Want to Find Cacciato?

Hey, just reminder that our meeting is tomorrow, Fri. Dec 1 at 12:20 sharp in J-130 (or thereabouts).
If you're interested to know what happened to old Cacciato, come on by and Brenda will tell you.
All right. We'll see y'all tomorrow!
Peace out!

Meeting

Is the meeting this Friday?

Easy Reader

Yup, this book is a piece of cake compared to the last one. I'm nearly done and I didn't even break a sweat. It holds my interest. Anyone else start it yet?

Cacciato In

Hey everyone,

Goign After Cacciato has arrived, and is waiting in Carr's office, E331. Send me an email with a time you want to come by and we'll make arrangements. All right. Talk to you later. Happy reading and have a great T-giving.

Cacciato on Order

Hey Folks,

Cacciato looked like the favorite, so I made the call to order that one from the bookstore. I'll let you know when it gets in -- hopefully next week some time. We may have to crank it out over the T-giving break, but if it reads anything like The Things they Carried, that won't be a big problem (of course I'm not taking into consideration all those research papers and lab reports and math finals you've got. that's why I'm an English teacher. I just chill out all semster, making movies, reading books, going down to DC to visit the Mall on beautiful sunny Fridays. And I have all summer off. I'm telling you, you nursing students and engineers and whatnot, I think you're deluded. Sure, you might be helping humanity, but so am I, right? Think of all those people I'm helping to learn how to write. So they can write their congresspeople and tell them how we live in a democracy and not a fascist police state, or their literary heroes and tell them how much they admire their work, or their grandmothers to remind them how much they meant to us as little kids. where would we be if we couldn't write?). OK. Enough diatribe.

Anybody want to summarize the last meeting? Some of the folks who weren't able to attend are curious about what we said (and I told them that we actually talked about the book, so I think we should come up with something fast).

Peace,
Carr

My vote

I was just talking about the theatre of the absurd to someone. Going after Cacciato is my pick, too.

July, July

This is my pick:
Synopses & Reviews
Publisher Comments:
As he did with In the Lake of the Woods, National Book Award winner Tim O'Brien strikes at the emotional nerve center of our lives with this ambitious, compassionate, and terrifically compelling new novel that tells the remarkable story of the generation molded and defined by the 1960s.
At the thirtieth anniversary of Minnesota's Darton Hall College class of 1969, ten old friends reassemble for a July weekend of dancing, drinking, flirting, reminiscing, and regretting. The three decades since their graduation have seen marriage and divorce, children and careers, dreams deferred and disappointed — many memories and many ghosts. Together their individual stories create a portrait of a generation launched into adulthood at the moment when their country, too, lost its innocence. Imbued with his signature themes of passion, memory, and yearning, July, July is Tim O'Brien's most fully realized work yet.

vote

i very much want to read the book of daniel after the tim o'brein book. checked the pratt website to find that doctorow's award ceremony is invitation only- grr.

as for o'brein, i'd like to read going after cacciato. the m&m thing got me.

The Book of Daniel

Amy and others in the meeting today expressed interest in reading The Book of Daniel by E. L. Doctorow over winter break to discuss at the beginning of the spring semester. I am posting a book description for that, also.

Book Description:

The central figure of this novel is a young man whose parents were executed for conspiring to steal atomic secrets for Russia.His name is Daniel Isaacson, and as the story opens, his parents have been dead for many years. He has had a long time to adjust to their deaths. He has not adjusted. Out of the shambles of his childhood, he has constructed a new life—marriage to an adoring girl who gives him a son of his own, and a career in scholarship. It is a life that enrages him.In the silence of the library at Columbia University, where he is supposedly writing a Ph.D. dissertation, Daniel composes something quite different.It is a confession of his most intimate relationships—with his wife, his foster parents, and his kid sister Susan, whose own radicalism so reproaches him. It is a book of memories: riding a bus with his parents to the ill-fated Paul Robeson concert in Peekskill; watching the FBI take his father away; appearing with Susan at rallies protesting their parents’ innocence; visiting his mother and father in the Death House.It is a book of investigation: transcribing Daniel’s interviews with people who knew his parents, or who knew about them; and logging his strange researches and discoveries in the library stacks.It is a book of judgments of everyone involved in the case—lawyers, police, informers, friends, and the Isaacson family itself.It is a book rich in characters, from elderly grand- mothers of immigrant culture, to covert radicals of the McCarthy era, to hippie marchers on the Pen-tagon. It is a book that spans the quarter-century of American life since World War II. It is a book about the nature of Left politics in this country—its sacrificial rites, its peculiar cruelties, its humility, its bitterness. It is a book about some of the beautiful and terrible feelings of childhood. It is about the nature of guilt and innocence, and about the relations of people to nations. It is The Book of Daniel.

Tim O'Brien's novels

Below are four novels by Tim O'Brien and their book descriptions/reviews. In case you were not at the book club meeting today, we decided to read a novel by Tim O'Brien other than The Things They Carried (many are reading that one for a class). He is coming to campus on Nov. 29th to speak, so we thought this would be a nice way to thank him by reading one of his other novels.

I think Carr said we need to vote as soon a possible, so he can order the books. The next book club meeting is tentatively scheduled for Dec 1st. It depends on whether we can get the Honor's room or not that day. Should I check into this with Pat? Or can someone else check, since I'm not on campus?

Also, if anyone has any other comments to discuss about Calvino, let me know. I have some more to say about him, I think. I'm reading his literary criticism book called The Uses of Literature or at least I've got that one on my list. :-)

Northern Lights

Northern Lights -368 pages

Book Description

Originally published in 1975, Tim O'Brien's debut novel demonstrates the emotional complexity and enthralling narrative tension that later earned him the National Book Award. At its core is the relationship between two brothers: one who went to Vietnam and one who stayed at home. As the two brothers struggle against an unexpected blizzard in Minnesota's remote north woods, what they discover about themselves and each other will change both of them for ever.

In the Lake of the Woods

In the Lake of the Woods - 320 pages

Amazon.com

Tim O'Brien has been writing about Vietnam in one way or another ever since he served there as an infantryman in the late 1960s. His earliest work on the subject, If I Die in a Combat Zone, was an intensely personal memoir of his own tour of duty; his books since then have featured many of the same elements of fear, boredom, and moral ambiguity but in a fictional setting. In 1994 O'Brien wrote In the Lake of the Woods, a novel that, while imbued with the troubled spirit of Vietnam, takes place entirely after the war and in the United States. The main character, John Wade, is a man in crisis: after spending years building a successful political career, he finds his future derailed during a bid for the U.S. Senate by revelations about his past as a soldier in Vietnam. The election lost by a landslide, John and his wife, Kathy, retreat to a small cabin on the shores of a Minnesota lake--from which Kathy mysteriously disappears.

Was she murdered? Did she run away? Instead of answering these questions, O'Brien raises even more as he slowly reveals past lives and long-hidden secrets. Included in this third-person narrative are "interviews" with the couple's friends and family as well as footnoted excerpts from a mix of fictionalized newspaper reports on the case and real reports pertaining to historical events--a mélange that lends the novel an eerie sense of verisimilitude. If Kathy's disappearance is at the heart of this work, then John's involvement in a My Lai-type massacre in Vietnam is its core, and O'Brien uses it to demonstrate how wars don't necessarily end when governments say they do. In the Lake of the Woods may not be true, but it feels true--and for Tim O'Brien, that's true enough. --Alix Wilber

If I Die in a Combat Zone : Box Me Up and Ship Me Home

If I Die in a Combat Zone : Box Me Up and Ship Me Home - 224 pages

Amazon.com

Over time, Tim O'Brien has used both art and artifice to shape his fictional accounts of Vietnam. Award-winning novels such as Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried offer up a surreal view of the war: a soldier who decides to walk to Paris, leaving only a trail of M&M's in his wake; a young man who imports his high-school girlfriend to his base camp high in the jungled mountains, only to lose her to a shadowy squad of Special Forces Green Berets and to "that mix of unnamed terror and unnamed pleasure" that was Vietnam. O'Brien's first account of the war, however, was written in the raw, unfiltered months following his return from Southeast Asia in 1969. If I Die in a Combat Zone has all of the eloquence and attention to language and detail that are a mark of the author's work; what is different about it is its straightforward, unembellished depiction of his personal experience of hell.

"When you are ordered to march through areas such as Pinkville--GI slang for Song My, parent village of My Lai ... you do some thinking. You hallucinate. You look ahead a few paces and wonder what your legs will resemble if there is more to the earth in that spot than silicates and nitrogen. Will the pain be unbearable? Will you scream or fall silent? Will you be afraid to look at your own body, afraid of the sight of your own red flesh and white bone? You wonder if the medic remembered his morphine."

O'Brien paints an unvarnished portrait of the infantry soldier's life that is at once mundane and terrifying--the endless days of patrolling punctuated by firefights that end as suddenly and inconclusively as they begin; the mind-numbing brutality of burned villages and trampled rice patties; the terror of tunnels, minefields, and the ever-present threat of death. Powerful as these scenes are, perhaps the most memorable chapter in the book concerns his decision to desert just a few weeks before he was sent to Vietnam. "The AWOL bag was ready to go, but I wasn't.... I burned the letters to my family. I read the others and burned them, too. It was over. I simply couldn't bring myself to flee. Family, the home town, friends, history, tradition, fear, confusion, exile: I could not run." Tim O'Brien went into the war opposing it and came out knowing exactly why. If I Die in a Combat Zone is more than just a memoir of a disastrous war; it is also a meditation on heroism and cowardice, on the mutability of truth and morality in a war zone and, most of all, on the simple, human capacity to endure the unendurable. --Alix Wilber

Going After Cacciato

I'll post 4 different novel reviews:

1) Going After Cacciato -352 pages.


Amazon.com

"In October, near the end of the month, Cacciato left the war."

In Tim O'Brien's novel Going After Cacciato the theater of war becomes the theater of the absurd as a private deserts his post in Vietnam, intent on walking 8,000 miles to Paris for the peace talks. The remaining members of his squad are sent after him, but what happens then is anybody's guess: "The facts were simple: They went after Cacciato, they chased him into the mountains, they tried hard. They cornered him on a small grassy hill. They surrounded the hill. They waited through the night. And at dawn they shot the sky full of flares and then they moved in.... That was the end of it. The last known fact. What remained were possibilities."

It is these possibilities that make O'Brien's National Book Award-winning novel so extraordinary. Told from the perspective of squad member Paul Berlin, the search for Cacciato soon enters the realm of the surreal as the men find themselves following an elusive trail of chocolate M&M's through the jungles of Indochina, across India, Iran, Greece, and Yugoslavia to the streets of Paris. The details of this hallucinatory journey alternate with feverish memories of the war--men maimed by landmines, killed in tunnels, engaged in casual acts of brutality that would be unthinkable anywhere else. Reminiscent of Joseph Heller's Catch-22, Going After Cacciato dishes up a brilliant mix of ferocious comedy and bleak horror that serves to illuminate both the complex psychology of men in battle and the overarching insanity of war. --Alix Wilber

Chapter 4 (or 8)

I'm through chapter 4, or maybe it's 8 depending on how you look at it, and I must say I'm drawn into the quasi story. Although I can't say for certain, I love the book and I loathe it at the same time. It's hard to explain, I like how the numbered chapters are told, you are reading a fictional story told to you about yourself (more so if your male), but the language that 'you' use as well as that of Ludmilla is completely un-natural, I would imagine even so if you were speaking Italian. And who says that abstract can't work? My personal favorite chapter so far is the title chapter 'If on a winter's night a traveler' because how the 'I' character is told from the point of view of the character, not the author pretending to be the character. Particularly I like how the 'I' character has his own consciousness completely separate from the author. So far (as best as I can figure) the 'story' is the numbered chapters and the titled chapters are short half-stories. With any luck I'll figure it all out by the end, and if not I'm not sure I would mind all that much.

I'm in love with Chapter 7

Chapter 7 of Calvino did it for me. It woke me up from the fog I was getting into with this book prior to this chapter. It all seems to fall into place now. Okay, it's 20 minutes till 9. I got to finish the book! I hope you all will be there tomorrow. I'm looking forward to it. (Sean, I know you're stretched for time. I'll miss you).

Hey, does anybody think reading a book over the winter break would be cool? Or maybe, we could be ambitious and read two books, and then discuss them both when the spring semester starts again?