The title essay speaks to the heart of the tragedy that was Vietnam - the things they carried included supplies, weapons, trinkets, superstitions, drugs, fear, cowardice, and bravado.
A few passages:
[T]he war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.
And an observation as relevant today as ever:
The only certainty that summer [of 1968] was moral confusion. It was my view then, and still is, that you don't make war without knowing why. Knowledge, of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead.
And strangely enough, I may have been most affected by the last chapter, "The Lives of the Dead," where O'Brien discusses childhood love and loss.
But this too is true: stories can save us. I'm forty-three years old, and a writer now, and even still, right here, I keep dreaming Linda Alive. And Ted Lavender too, and Kiowa, and Curt Lemon, and [more]. They're all dead. But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world.
I had never heard of this book until this spring, when I saw a theatrical adaptation, which was ambitious but a bit of a disaster. Which is a shame, because O'Brien's creation is powerful and fundamentally honest.
1 comment:
Hey Erin,
I look forward to hearing what you think of Inheritance of Loss. I read it a few months ago with (newish) my book group. Catherine
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