Going After Cacciato: A Novel

· Crown
4.2
25 reviews
eBook
352
Pages
Eligible
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About this eBook

A CLASSIC FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE THINGS THEY CARRIED

"To call Going After Cacciato a novel about war is like calling Moby-Dick a novel about whales."

So wrote The New York Times of Tim O'Brien's now classic novel of Vietnam. Winner of the 1979 National Book Award, Going After Cacciato captures the peculiar mixture of horror and hallucination that marked this strangest of wars.

In a blend of reality and fantasy, this novel tells the story of a young soldier who one day lays down his rifle and sets off on a quixotic journey from the jungles of Indochina to the streets of Paris. In its memorable evocation of men both fleeing from and meeting the demands of battle, Going After Cacciato stands as much more than just a great war novel. Ultimately it's about the forces of fear and heroism that do battle in the hearts of us all.

Now with Extra Libris material, including a reader’s guide and bonus content

Ratings and reviews

4.2
25 reviews
A Google user
26 March 2010
The Viet Nam war was at its worst as this story takes place in 1968. American men are being killed in vast numbers. With many of the men in Cacciato's unit, wounded or killed and with the monsoon season causing havoc on the men's health, Cacciato decides that he's had enough and walks away from his unit, planning to walk to Paris. There are symbols of hope and death, faith and despair, war and peace, as we follow Cacciato's path. He has maps and will travel through Laos, into Burma and India and other countries on his journey. The first sign that this story is and allegory is when the men in Cacciato's unit are ordered after him and are able to follow his path because he leaves M&M candies along the path. Rich in symbolism, we read of the picture of Christ inside a dead soldier's helmet and the damaged Buddah in the lieutenant's pagoda. The story is narrated by Paul Berlin who has just been assigned to the unit. The story moves from actual scenes of men getting killed, Viet Nam villages being burned and we see the horrors of war. Then we go to the tale of following Cacciato which at times becomes absurd. At one point, the unit has been traveling with a young Viet Namese girl when they all fall into enemy tunnels. They can't find a way out and the girl tells them, she knows, if we got here by falling in, all we have to do is fall out. With no true indication of the separation between what is real and what is in Berlin's imagination, the story became confusing to this reader.
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A Google user
I read the book after reading a review or two so I already knew the concept and it made the book easier to read. Knowing what the author was trying to portray, it was much easier to follow and to understand where the story was going. This was an imaginative story and I thought well done.
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Drmetalman1
17 May 2014
This book kept me locked in until I finished it........great writer........off to get another by Tim OBrien right now. LINDSEY......read an online summary it help me out quite a bit
3 people found this review helpful
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About the author

Tim O’Brien received the 1979 National Book Award in fiction for Going After Cacciato. His other works include the Pulitzer finalist and a New York Times Book of the Century, The Things They Carried; the acclaimed novels Tomcat in Love and Northern Lights; and the national bestselling memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone. His novel In the Lake of the Woods received the James Fenimore Cooper Prize from the Society of American Historians and was named the best novel of 1994 by Time. In 2010 he received the Katherine Anne Porter Award for a distinguished lifetime body of work and in 2012 he received the Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award from the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation. He was awarded the Pritzker Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing in 2013.

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