Going After Cacciato

How does one capture and transmit what the mixture of boredom and abject terror that is often a soldier’s life does to the psyche most effectively?

I had read a number of fictionalized reportages and Slaughterhouse-Five by Vonnegut, which added science fiction. Still, it wasn’t until I powered through this book that I felt I could know how difficult it is for young men to try and make sense of it. The book was a puzzle with pieces that were hard to place next to each other into a coherent picture, and that felt to me like what Vietnam did… show more.

A 1979 National Book Award winner for fiction, O’Brien’s first Vietnam War novel is, for me, his best piece of writing, and O’Brien in our 2014 interview concurred. Yes, it’s a timeless but freshly told war story about one soldier’s struggle to overcome fear and act courageously on the battlefield. The book’s attraction for me, however, is the complex, engaging, lyrical manner in which the story is told—multiple time sequences and narrative strands, realism mixed with magical realism, and the central character’s interplay of memory and imagination in recalling and creating events. The book is also a how-to manual on… show more.

“To call Going After Cacciato a novel about war is like calling Moby Dick a novel about whales”. So wrote The New York Times about Tim O’Brien’s acclaimed anti-war tale of a soldier going AWOL during the Vietnam War. Haunting and psychedelic – the protagonist falls into a tunnel and winds up in Paris – Going After Cacciato is easily one of my favorite works of modern fiction. I tried to work a Tim O’Brien quote into my own book – I think the line, “the thing about remembering is that you don’t forget” - but securing the rights proved… show more.

I didn’t love this book at first, but it’s grown on me as a deceptively inventive anti-war novel. One day, frustrated GI Paul Berlin resolves to walk away from the Vietnam War—by walking in a straight line. His journey takes him from the jungles of Southeast Asia to India to the streets of Paris. It’s a sometimes puzzling ride and about so much more than going AWOL that it has to be experienced. Tim O’Brien gets away with tricking the reader, but by the time you realize it, you probably don’t care as it’s the ultimate desperate escape.