Is the Lesson to Draw from Tim O'Brien That Hope Is the Most Important Thing to Carry?

When I was working on the final chapters of my book Before We Forget: How Remembering Will Get Us through the Next 75 Years, I struggled with what I was going to tell people to do to prepare for tough times ahead. The book was supposed to be a hopeful one, laying out the predicament we're in now, but showing ways that we can approach the future and make sure that our civilizations survive. I knew I had to also give some advice on what to have ready to take with us as we go forward.

It took me a while, but finally I decided a good place to begin was Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. The collection of inter-connected short stories is considered one of the very best books about the Vietnam War.
O’Brien starts the book by detailing the things carried by a group of soldiers as they fought in the country’s jungles. Some things were linked to their previous lives: Lieutenant Jimmy Cross kept letters from a girl he hoped to love folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack. Other things the soldiers carried were determined by necessity or near-necessity: can openers, pocketknives, dog tags, mosquito repellent, chewing gum, C-rations, matches, cigarettes, steel-centred nylon-covered flak jackets, one large compress bandage (usually in the helmet band for easy access), and:
"Until he was shot, Ted Lavender carried six or seven ounces of premium dope, which for him was a necessity. Mitchell Sanders, the RTO [radio telephone operator], carried condoms. Norman Bowker carried a diary. Rat Kiley carried comic books. Kiowa, a devout Baptist, carried an illustrated New Testament that had been presented to him by his father, who taught Sunday school in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. As a hedge against bad times, however, Kiowa also carried his grandmother’s distrust of the white man, his grandfather’s old hunting hatchet.
"Necessity dictated."
Necessity dictates a lot, and one of the most necessary things is the telling of stories. Sometimes the stories are explanations of what has been happening, sometimes they are a sort of spell against what may happen. If they are done right, they can be transformative, and if the story teller has a soul filled with art, they can be both a pleasure and a pain to hear.
As I write, the world is embroiled in a half dozen conflicts, some big, some small, all harrowing for the people involved. I wonder if there is a soldier somewhere taking notes, talking into his phone, preparing the way for a book that one day may cause people to reflect on the wars going on now. Would that book change the way history unfolds? Probably not. No more than O'Brien's book has kept us out of the current wars...
But we can hope that it makes some difference. And hope is perhaps the most important thing to carry.

The Library Book: A Tribute to Books, Reading and the Places Where Our Culture Is Kept.

  

A librarian friend of mine recommended The Library Book by Susan Orleans quite a while ago, but it is only this month that I sat down and started to read it.  And a very good read it is.

 

Orleans who had a love affair with libraries from an early age  set out to tell the story of the Los Angeles Public Library and the fire that nearly swept away its main branch in 1986.  She operates on two time frames.  The first is the history of the library itself, which goes back the mid-19th century. The second is what happened one fateful spring day when somehow the library caught fire, and what happened then: salvaging thousands of books that were waterlogged and/or scorched by fire, rebuilding, and trying to find who set the library on fire.  The book's ante-hero is Harry Peake, a would-be actor and big time fabulator, who confessed more than once to setting the fire, but also denied he knew anything about what had happened that fateful day.

 

The book ends with the rebuilt library open for business and under-current of satisfaction that books, library-lovers, and the great history of collections of the world's knowledge survive against sometimes stiff odds. We never learn who set the library on fire, but we don't care because the books survive.

 

Orlean wrote her book when the shift toward  internet dependence was just beginning: it was published in 2018.  We hear how people still called the library to get information, even though it was becoming very easy to Google a query oneself.  Physical books were the foundation of the library's collection and e-books were somewhat of a novelty.   

 

Time have changed somewhat. Visit any library today and you'll see that the shelves are still filled with physical books, but e-books are now an extremely large portion of collections.  The great increase in e-book use followed the Covid 19 pandemic (the American Library Association says the jump was in 2021-22. ) I know that I had never borrowed on before the Bibliothèque de Montréal shut the doors to its many branches during the lock-down.  Ever vigilant, the library system  added something like 45,000 e-book titles over night early on in the pandemic.  How wonderful it was to be able to have access to books even when I was stuck at home!

 

The habit has endured: I currently have two physical books out of my local library, and two e-books waiting for me on Libby.  I think I'd rather read a physical book, but it is very nice to be able to pull out my phone and pick up where I left off reading an e-book.  That's how I was able to read a good portion of The Library Book while on the bus or in the Métro without lugging a physical book with me everywhere.

Vikram Seth's Passage to India

  

I first went to India in the summer of 1994, or rather it seems that way to me today.  Actually I first set foot on that great subcontinent a decade later when I visited Kerala state, doing research for my book Green City: People, Nature and Urban Places (Véhicule Press, 2007) but in 1994 I spent much of the summer reading Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy.  At nearly 1500 pages it was literally heavy reading even in paperback, but it also transported me to the India of the 1950s so engagingly that I didn't mind the length.

 

The story is simple: a young woman and her mother are on the lookout for a suitable young man for her to marry.  She falls in love with someone who is not acceptable because of his religion (shades of Romeo and Juliet) and she ultimately marries someone who at first glance seems totally unimpressive, but who turns out to have wonderful qualities (shades of Beauty and the Beast.)

 

But far from being a bloated, formulaic Romance, the novel is a detailed, often funny, acutely observed portrait of India at a time of national affirmation.  I couldn't help thinking of it often as I read Kiran Desai's The Loneliness of Sunny and Sonia (book review July 11. )  While Desai writes brilliantly, and tells a multi-faceted story,  the novel stumbles when it enters the realm of magic realism.  Seth is consistently realistic, and the arc of his story is much clearer, on the other hand.  His book is as rewarding a read as a real trip to India can be for those who don't know that corner of the world.

 

After decades of delay, Seth is promising to publish a sequel,  A Suitable Girl in Fall 2026.  In it, the young girl of the first novel is now in her 80s and is trying to find a good match for her grandson.  I'm looking forward to reading it, but perhaps I shouldn't hold my breath since Seth has previously set at least two other publication dates which passed without the book appearing.