 |
About a year ago I had the good fortune of coming across Tim O’Brien’s The Things They carried in my American History class. A work of fiction, by O’Brien’s own admission, that often appears a true story of O’Brien’s own time in Vietnam. It depicts war better than any other book I’ve read, and having survived it myself I can vouch for the picture it paints. You will lose yourself in the truths and untruths of the soldiers’ storytelling, and soon you’ll realize that you are unable to distinguish.
The Things They Carried was beyond excellent so when I saw this book sitting on my friend’s desk I swiped it immediately (with his knowledge of course). In The Lake of The Woods is quite a bit different from The Things They Carried, but it still draws much of its underlying story from events in Vietnam. The story has no ending from what I understand. I have not finished it yet, so I can’t say with certainty, but it appears that we are left to draw our own conclusions. We follow the story of John Wade through the events that surround the vanishing of his wife Kathy, occasionally interrupted with a court-style summary of evidence and testimony. The story takes us to John Wade’s traumatic childhood event of losing his father and as we move on to his time in Vietnam and beyond, we understand the presence of his childhood trauma that was never dealt with.
“At bottom, this is a tale about the moral effects of suppressing a true story, about the abuse of history, and what happens to you when you pretend there is no history.”
- The New York Times Book Review
