An engrossing collection about the brutality and confusion of the Vietnam War.
A debut collection of fiction and nonfiction ruminates on the Vietnam War and other calamities.
The fog of war fills every page of this volume, preventing clarity and necessitating an uncertain, grasping speculation on the part of everyone involved: characters, readers, and author. The nonfiction section is dominated by Tiffany’s “Vietnam Anti-Memoirs,” a novella-length series of essays accounting for different periods in the life of an Army combat medic who served in the war: witnessing an unintentional massacre of civilians in 1966; searching for accurate representations of the conflict in the books and movies made in the following decades; returning to the country in the ’90s in search of closure. The fiction section features two stories set during the war. “Saigon Passional” tells the tale of a member of the Women’s Army Corps working in the Army Mortuary, where she must see to the body of a Green Beret who bears strange wounds reminiscent of a crucifixion. The title story follows a Special Forces sergeant assigned to guard the wife of an American dignitary in the early days of the war. Other fictional tales are set in Frederick the Great’s Berlin and ancient Rome, but the shadow of Vietnam hangs over even these unrelated stories. Tiffany has a fine eye for the surreal, locating and highlighting the most startling aspects of a given scenario. The author is at his best when he offers direct descriptions and stark images, as here, where a medic tends to the wounds of the civilians his countrymen have just shot: “They cowered in their pain, seeming to await further brutality. They were even sheepish in their agony. As he toiled over the wounds he repeated again and again, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ They shrunk from his words.” The nonfiction pieces generally work better than the fiction ones, as Tiffany’s essayistic tendencies sometimes clutter the stories’ pages and weigh down the narrative momentum. Even so, there is an odd cohesion to the book. Fiction and nonfiction seem to blur even within individual pieces, and an aesthetic of fragmentation hovers above all. The author may not have solved the problem of how to write about the Vietnam War, but this volume seems a step in the right direction.
An engrossing collection about the brutality and confusion of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-578-65051-7
Page Count: 293
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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