May 30th, 2011 / 8:29 am
Snippets
Snippets
Sean Lovelace—
Best book on Vietnam War: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, otherwise?
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Meta
dispatches – michael herr
Meditations in Green – Stephen Wright.
The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien
armies of the night
Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson
my dad really liked matterhorn by karl malantes
in addition to obriens thigns they carried and going after cacciato, i liked novel without a name by duong thu huong
i think dispatches is still my favorite
Koko by Peter Straub.
Definitely. No other book can touch DISPATCHES.
Dien Cai Dau by Komunyakaa
I’m trying to read this now. Having a bit of trouble.
Another vote for DISPATCHES.
motorman by david ohle
best album? black monk time by the monks
I have a soft spot for Gustav Hasford’s THE SHORT-TIMERS.
TREE OF SMOKE blows.
Place: Dog Soldiers, Robert Stone.
Going After Cacciato by Tim O’Brien.
I haven’t read much of this kind of fiction, but I absolutely love Dirty Work by Larry Brown, which is more about the aftermath in two men’s lives.
i was just going to recommend this book. robert stone is class. and dog soldiers is tight.
The Tunnels of Cu-Chi by Tom Mangold — best of non-fiction.
An appropriate day for the question.
I haven’t read all the books even on this list so far, but Dispatches is my favorite of what I’ve read.
My favorite strictly-‘war’ novel is The Killer Angels – in a way, also a ‘Vietnam’ book.
Favorite Vietnam movie: Sundays and Cybele (Fr. Les Dimanches de Ville d’Avray.
The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh
Definitely Meditations in Green.
Lush, hallucinatory, acidly comic…it’s fucking amazing.
Definitely Meditations in Green.
Lush, hallucinatory, acidly comic…it’s fucking amazing.
Bloods.
In Pharaoh’s Army by Tobias Wolff and The Things They Carried
i took a class on ‘violence in 20th century american lit’ and read dispatches. thought ‘i hate tim o’brien and all vietnam-related fiction’ until i read that book. then i read denis johnson’s tree of smoke and now i think that book is KING of all vietnam fiction.
Another vote for The Things They Carried
I’ll second that album and third the Fall’s reworkings of two tracks off it.
Tree of Smoke is one I haven’t yet (?) read. Angels is an old favorite, I neither minded nor loved Fiskadoro, and, this weekend, I raced – I don’t think this pace damages the book – through Nobody Move. On p. 131 (hardcover), there is this misprint (? – clothing is being talked of) in Nobody Move:
That phrasing seems likely to me to be a fine title for all of Johnson’s fiction.
In poetry: Bly’s “teeth mother naked” is totally weird, Alice Notley’s “Descent of Alette” is kind of about Vietnam (or at least its aftermath), Bill Knott’s poems from the late 60s. Of course Dispatches is great. Bruce Franklin’s “Vietnam and Other Fantasies” is a really good scholarly/memoir/history book, among other things investigating the prevalent right-wing fantasy that lefties spat on soldiers all the time and the relationship between Rambo and Reagan etc.
Johannes
novel: Paco’s Story by Larry Heineman
non-fiction: dispatches
Song of Napalm by Bruce Weigl
Two short-stories come to mind: Pugilist at Rest, Thom Jones; Midnight and I’m Not Famous Yet, Hannah
The Pugilist at Rest collection has a few other Vietnam related stories that are pretty wow.
Speaking of war stories, just read your latest in One-Story. Totally bitchin’.
“Many
would say this was a disruption of the plot, a disconnection, a loss of
perspective. They’d say this style proved the writer’s inherent
weakness: his spirit was willing but his flesh wasn’t.” (Ninh, 230)
good call on Hannah. Weirdly re-read that story from Aships today.
What did you thing of T of Smoke’s ending? I sort of thought it disinterested.
What blows about it? doesn’t it start strong then start to blow?
groan
Also, Toys in a Field by Yusef Komunyakaa
I’m a Johnson fan, but I can make it through only one out of about every three books he writes, and this wasn’t one of them. It seemed a storyless ambing mess to me.
Tobias Wolff’s “In the Pharoah’s Army” was pretty good, as I recall, though not as strong as “This Boy’s Life.”
The Girl in The Picture by Denise Chong, The Quiet American by Graham Green, Novel Without A Name Duong Thu Huong, Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh
Yup. Can’t really fuck with Dispatches. I also enjoyed Tree of Smoke, and I’d be curious to see the comments about its blowing expanded on.
thank you thank you
the things they carried. for sure.
Larry Heinemen came to visit a class I was in when Paco’s Story was a NBA finalist. The teacher, a female, read us an excerpt that was in Playboy and Heineman smoked a cigar in class. This was back when a sign would be Painted on the chalkboard, “No Smoking in Class.”
I would add Robert Olen Butler’s A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain.
Larry Heinemen came to visit a class I was in when Paco’s Story was a NBA finalist. The teacher, a female, read us an excerpt that was in Playboy and Heineman smoked a cigar in class. This was back when a sign would be Painted on the chalkboard, “No Smoking in Class.”
I would add Robert Olen Butler’s A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain.
Paco’s Story won the National Book Award that year. But you know, Close Quarters, Heineman’s other Vietnam War novel was also terrific, but more a straight up war book. Paco’s Story has a Dear Hunterish aspect that makes it seem grander in scope. But Close Quarters, that was a great one as well.
No one seems to have mentioned Rumor of War, which was also damn good.
Jesus. We’ve gotten this far without a single mention of Gravity’s Rainbow.
Love Graham Greene
Dense book, not everyone’s read it. Also it, uh, ain’t about Vietnam.
I’m not going to defend the whole thing because it’s been too long, but that opening half dozen pages of TREE OF SMOKE with the monkey and private rival any pages of fiction for heart and language I’ve ever read.
only if Altman’s MASH is only about the Korean War….
Between the novel about WWII and the movie about the Korean War, which is your favorite book about Vietnam?
Well, Pynchon is a ’50s/’60s guy, and, to me, anyway, Gravity’s Rainbow – I’m a huge fan of that of his novels – is a curdled-disillusionment book, surely informed (‘structured inwardly’) by the American (national) swallowing and puking up/explosively shitting of military adventure in Vietnam.
But Gravity’s Rainbow is a crisis-of-European-modernity story, not an Americans-fuck-up-at-the-top-and-get-violent-all-the-way-down story. “America” isn’t the ‘villain’ in Gravity’s Rainbow – and, though (no spoiler) corporatism is the Devil, the deviltry is played out in unmistakably and ineradicably western European places and ways. You might say, a Henry-James ‘American’ lostness – but in a concrete Europe, not a jungle. There’s clarity: Slothrop figures out – and so do we – what his connection to the V-2 rockets is. – to deny that ratiocinatory, eh, project seems essential – at least ’til now – to the American imagining of “Vietnam”.
MASH is hippies-in-the-‘army’ – okay: the cliche of ‘Vietnam, not Korea’ obtains, but you could even say ‘Podunk State, not real war’.
I’d suggested earlier that The Killer Angels is a ‘kind’ of Vietnam book because the writer lived through that consciousness of failure of the country to deserve patriotism. That’s too much of a stretch: Shaara successfully (albeit fictively) told his story at Gettysburg at the turn a Joolah, 18 an 63. I think Pynchon does a similar thing with Slothrop in western Europe.
The Big Valley
[This question is probably for you, lorian.]
Thanks for your comments. I enjoyed reading them. I’m sure there’s something to be said regarding Heidegger’s comparison of German and American weltanschauung, privileging the former with a sigh, though let’s leave well enough alone.
My own nomination can be found second from the start. My comment about GR was just an expression of surprise that no one had mentioned it in the first 50 comments.
Sean,
So you succeeded in getting a crowd of adult humans to bleat off like sheep about our Viet favorites. But you haven’t chimed in, nor have you mentioned your purpose in posing this question. Please do so.
Lost sheep to shepherd: please come in.