Tim O' Brien

I'm actually reading Going After Cacciato right now and i like it a lot. I enjoyed The Things They Carried as well. I read The Nuclear Age years ago before i even knew who he was or that he was famous for his Vietnam stuff. That's a weird book. I think he sold like 3 copies of it. It's been so long though that i don't remember much about it.I would recommend The Things They Carried to just about anybody. It's a fine book and i'm not a real war-fiction buff. and i've had my fill of the disillusioned american perspective on that war. I'd love it if somebody could point me in the direction of a book that tells the story from a Vietnamese perspective. (basically, i wouldn't be reading his Vietnam tales right now if i didn't think that he was an exceptional writer)

If I were Tim O'Brien, I'd be damned frustrated to the point of tearing my hair out, because everyone seems to agree that his Vietnam works, The Things They Carried and Going After Cacciato, are his best and none of his recent work meets the same high standard.

And I have to say that I agree that those are his best works and his other stuff is sort of meh. He may not exactly be 'played out', but the evidence points that way.

six books about vietnam!! get over it tim!!!

i read "going after cacciato" and absolutely loved it. i actually re-read it shortly after finishing to try and figure out where exactly it all goes into Paul Berlin's head.

I read "Going after Cacciato" and "the Things they Carried" and liked both, then read "If I DIe In A Combat Zone" which is his best Vietnam book. He says everything he needs to say about the War in it, then went back and said a little more in the other books.

His last couple (Tomcat In Love and July, July) have not been Nam-related, so he does seem to have gotten over it, to an extent, though I have not read either....

TTTC:
Some of the stories (well, the title story most of all) were brilliant, but I have to say I thought some of them were disappointing. One in particular has the soldiers drowning in shit (in a shit field, to be exact), and he kept coming back to that scene again and again. Enough! thinks I. I get it.

It's interesting to try to figure out what's autobiographical here. A lot of the little stories in the collection are about Tim the writer, including one where he goes back to Vietnam with his daughter to visit some of the scenes that inspired the stories. Later, I read that he has no daughter. So if those in-between commentary pieces aren't commentary but fictional pseudo-commentary, then I'm really not sure how valuable they are.