Two Incredibly Brief Book Reviews

I was in the process of revising a short story a few days ago and, as will sometimes happen, found myself temporarily blocked.

After some moments of staring blankly at the computer screen, I realized that a bit of light might be shed on my problems if I simply returned to peruse the books on my shelves. The are some excellent books sitting there, by some really remarkable authors, and I was certain that in reviewing them I might find something – anything – to spark an idea.

No small amount of time later, I realized that I’d simply forgotten about my own story and had become glued to the pages of the books on my shelves, rereading certain favorite parts – from two books in particular.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - By Haruki Murakami
I first read this book eight years ago, and parts of it have continued to linger in my mind. It is an undoubtedly strange book – one that begins in the present day with the mysterious disappearance of the main character’s wife, only to coil back through the past and into the present again. Utilizing first-person narration, faux-news clippings, letters, journal entries, and flashbacks, Murakami creates an almost dreamlike effect in portions of the novel (and recreates the characters’ literal dreams upon occasion).

Other sections of the novel – especially those set in Manchuria just before and just after WWII – take on the qualities of a particularly brutal (and realistic) nightmare.

The novel doesn’t completely work – the myriad parts don’t completely mesh – and yet the book is so ambitious in its many themes (love, the place of history in modern memory, and memory itself – to name but a few), and it is so well written in its individual parts, that the book is well worth trying.

The Things They Carried - By Tim O'Brien
One of my favorite books.

It’s a collection of interconnected stories centered around a character named Tim and his platoon during the Vietnam War.

The book is not an autobiography – O’Brien has stated that despite the presence of a character named Tim O’Brien, portions of the book are entirely fictional.

This doesn’t matter. To try and parse fact from fiction would miss the point of O’Brien’s book – which has to do with the greater truths that he learned about men in war, and human beings in general.

O’Brien’s prose is lean but never simplistic, highly readable but never shallow. It is often brutal, but only when brutality is necessary to prove a rather moral point.

Stories of particular note in this volume include “The Things They Carried,” “How to Tell a True war Story,” and “The Lives of the Dead.”