Four things:
- Self got sucked in by the Hypothesis chapters.
- She liked all the quotes from the transcripts of the court-martial of Lt. William Calley, but the quotes about Custer, then about the British slaughter of American civilians during the war of independence — the lines being drawn across history — couldn’t say she really liked that approach.
- She will never, ever go to that part of the border with Canada. Never. The Hypothesis section that describes Kath getting turned around, thinking she was going south when she was actually going north, the bitter cold, the running out of gasoline for the boat engine, the vast and empty wildnerness, ugh.
- Landscape, landscape, landscape. Whether describing Vietnam or a lake or the dense, wooded forests of the border with Canada, there is great precision in O’Brien’s descriptions of physical settings. Compared to them, self’s own (meager) evocations of setting are like the dot dash dot dash of semaphores.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Kanlaon 