As Promised - a book I didn't really like....

Going after Cacciato - Tim O'Brien
I have a bad habit of wanting to know all of the references both literary and artistic in any piece of music I hear (or TV show I watch... a bit OCD, I know). So when I heard the Jackopierce album Live from the Americas, and specifically the tune where the line "Cacciato came to me in a dream" appears I was inevitably curious as to who Cacciato was.

Sometimes curiosity is good, sometimes it is what kills the cat. The book was not very good, though it does put forth an interesting and drug addled view of Vietnam. The premise is that a soldier, Cacciato, has left his platoon, giving up on war (generally an admirable sentiment) saying that he is going to Paris - - walking to Paris - -from Vietnam. A recon group is sent to go bring him back, whatever the cost, and apparently from whatever LSD induced dimension he happens to be inhabiting at the time.

Most of the story is told through drug-addled flashbacks and hallucinations which can be intensely difficult to follow. The characters were hard for me to identify with, but O'Brien's other well known book, The Things They Carried, was supposedly one of the defining novels of the Vietnam era, although I have not read it and am not likely to anytime soon. It is possible that my difficulty in identifying with the characters is more generational than necessarily a comment on the quality of the book. The largely anti-war message comes through loud-and-clear which may be its sole redeeming factor.
Rating: C-
Related: (other books apparently written while inebriated)
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S. Thompson
Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac