商品の説明
The Things They Carried: A Work of Fiction
Amazon.co.jp
「彼らはいつ死ぬかもしれぬ男たちが背負うべき感情的な重荷を抱えて歩いていた。悲しみ、恐怖、愛、憧れ、それらは漠として実体のないものだった。しかしそういう触知しがたいものはそれ事態の質量と比重を有していた。それらは触知できる重荷を持っていた。彼らは恥に満ちた記憶を抱えて歩いていた。彼らは辛うじて制御された臆病さの秘密を共有していた。（中略）人々は殺し、そして殺された。そうしないことにはきまりが悪かったからだ」。（村上春樹訳、文春文庫）
1999年、ピューリッツァー賞、米国書評家協会賞という2つの賞の最終審査に残った『The Things They Carried』（邦題『本当の戦争の話をしよう』）は、ティム・オブライエンが同じくベトナム戦争について書いた以前の作品── 回想録『If I Die in a Combat Zone』（邦題『僕が戦場で死んだら』）や小説『Going After Cacciato』（邦題『カチアートを追跡して』）―― とは微妙だが決定的な違いがある。これは回想録でも長編小説でも短編小説集でもなく、これら3つの形式を巧みに組み合せた、幻覚を誘発する効果さえありそうな不思議な作品である。
ベトナムはいまだにオブライエンのテーマだが、この本を見るかぎり彼は戦争そのものよりも、戦争に対する数えきれない視点に興味をもっているように思われる。そしてその多角的な視点を通してこの作品を書いているのである。『Going After Cacciato』が「現実」を扱っているのに対し、『The Things They Carried』は「真実」を扱っている。
この本に収められた短編のほとんどは、「ティム」が語り手になっている。だがオブライエンは、ここに記録したできごとの多くは実際には起きていないことを腹蔵なく認めている。彼は「The Man I Killed」の中の「ティム」とは違って人を殺してはいないし、「Ambush」の中の「ティム」とも違ってキャスリーンという娘などいない。
しかし、あるできごとが実際には起きていないという、ただそれだけの理由で、実際に起きたできごとよりも真実味がないということにはならない。「On the Rainy River」に登場するティム・オブライエンは徴兵通知を受け取ると車で北へ向かい、カナダとの国境近くのさびれたロッジでエルロイという老人と共に6日間を過ごし、そのあいだ悶々と、兵役を逃れるべきか戦場に行くべきか悩み続ける。実際のティム・オブライエンは北へ向かいはしなかったし、カナダ側の岸から20ヤードの位置に浮かぶ釣り舟の上で心を決めたりはしなかった。黙ってスーフォールズ行きのバスに乗り、そのまま米国陸軍に入ったのである。
だが、「On the Rainy River」における真実は、そこに描かれた事実にあるのではなく、そこに描かれたうそ偽りのない心理的な体験にある。どちらのティムも正しいとは思わない戦争に参加し、そうしたことで自分を卑怯者だと考えたのである。
『The Things They Carried』の短編は、どれもティム・オブライエンがベトナムで学んだもう1つの真実を物語っている。それは真実と現実、あるいは事実と小説の間のあいまいな線であり、これこそが彼の作品を脳裏に焼きついて離れないものにしているのである。
出版社/著者からの内容紹介
村上春樹が敬愛する作家の短編集。ヴェトナム戦争で若者が見たものとは？ 胸の内に「戦争」を抱えたすべての人におくる真実の物語
--このテキストは、 文庫 版に関連付けられています。
内容（「BOOK」データベースより）
日ざかりの小道で呆然と、「私が殺した男」を見つめる兵士、木陰から一歩踏み出したとたん、まるでセメント袋のように倒れた兵士、祭の午後、故郷の町をあてどなく車を走らせる帰還兵…。ヴェトナムの・本当の・戦争の・話とは?O・ヘンリー賞を受賞した「ゴースト・ソルジャーズ」をはじめ、心を揺さぶる、衝撃の短編小説集。胸の内に「戦争」を抱えたすべての人におくる22の物語。 --このテキストは、 文庫 版に関連付けられています。
Amazon.com
”They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing--these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice.... Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to.”
A finalist for both the 1990 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Things They Carried marks a subtle but definitive line of demarcation between Tim O’Brien’s earlier works about Vietnam, the memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone and the fictional Going After Cacciato, and this sly, almost hallucinatory book that is neither memoir nor novel nor collection of short stories but rather an artful combination of all three. Vietnam is still O’Brien’s theme, but in this book he seems less interested in the war itself than in the myriad different perspectives from which he depicts it. Whereas Going After Cacciato played with reality, The Things They Carried plays with truth. The narrator of most of these stories is ”Tim”; yet O’Brien freely admits that many of the events he chronicles in this collection never really happened. He never killed a man as ”Tim” does in ”The Man I Killed,” and unlike Tim in ”Ambush,” he has no daughter named Kathleen. But just because a thing never happened doesn’t make it any less true. In ”On the Rainy River,” the character Tim O’Brien responds to his draft notice by driving north, to the Canadian border where he spends six days in a deserted lodge in the company of an old man named Elroy while he wrestles with the choice between dodging the draft or going to war. The real Tim O’Brien never drove north, never found himself in a fishing boat 20 yards off the Canadian shore with a decision to make. The real Tim O’Brien quietly boarded the bus to Sioux Falls and was inducted into the United States Army. But the truth of ”On the Rainy River” lies not in facts but in the genuineness of the experience it depicts: both Tims went to a war they didn’t believe in; both considered themselves cowards for doing so. Every story in The Things They Carried speaks another truth that Tim O’Brien learned in Vietnam; it is this blurred line between truth and reality, fact and fiction, that makes his book unforgettable. --Alix Wilber
From Publishers Weekly
Weapons and good-luck charms carried by U.S. soldiers in Vietnam here represent survival, lost innocence and the war’s interminable legacy. ”O’Brien’s meditations--on war and memory, on darkness and light--suffuse the entire work with a kind of poetic form, making for a highly original, fully realized novel,” said PW. 60,000 first printing.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --このテキストは、絶版本またはこのタイトルには設定されていない版型に関連付けられています。
Book Description
One of the first questions people ask about The Things They Carried is this: Is it a novel, or a collection of short stories? The title page refers to the book simply as ”a work of fiction,” defying the conscientious reader’s need to categorize this masterpiece. It is both: a collection of interrelated short pieces which ultimately reads with the dramatic force and tension of a novel. Yet each one of the twenty-two short pieces is written with such care, emotional content, and prosaic precision that it could stand on its own.
The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and of course, the character Tim O’Brien who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three. They battle the enemy (or maybe more the idea of the enemy), and occasionally each other. In their relationships we see their isolation and loneliness, their rage and fear. They miss their families, their girlfriends and buddies; they miss the lives they left back home. Yet they find sympathy and kindness for strangers (the old man who leads them unscathed through the mine field, the girl who grieves while she dances), and love for each other, because in Vietnam they are the only family they have. We hear the voices of the men and build images upon their dialogue. The way they tell stories about others, we hear them telling stories about themselves.
With the creative verve of the greatest fiction and the intimacy of a searing autobiography, The Things They Carried is a testament to the men who risked their lives in America’s most controversial war. It is also a mirror held up to the frailty of humanity. Ultimately The Things They Carried and its myriad protagonists call to order the courage, determination, and luck we all need to survive.
From the Back Cover
”I’ve got to make you read this book.... In a world filled too often with numbness, or shifting values, these stories shine in a strange and opposite direction, moving against the flow, illuminating life’s wonder.”
--Rick Bass, The Dallas Morning News
”The Things They Carried is more than ’another’ book about Vietnam.... It is a master stroke of form and imagery.... The Things They Carried is about life, about men who [fight] and die, about buddies, and about a lost innocence that might be recaptured through the memory of stories. O’Brien tells us these stories because he must. He tells them as they have never been told before.”
--Richmond Times-Dispatch
About the Author
A native of Worthington, Minnesota, Tim O’Brien graduated in 1968 from Macalester College in St. Paul. He served as a foot soldier in Vietnam from 1969 to 1970, after which he pursued graduate studies in Government at Harvard University, then later worked as a national affairs reporter for the Washington Post. He now lives in Massachusetts.
Other books by Tim O’Brien include If I Die in a Combat Zone Box Me Up and Ship Me Home, Going After Cacciato, Northern Lights, The Nuclear Age, and In the Lake of the Woods. Going After Cacciato won the National Book Award in 1979. In the Lake of the Woods won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize from the society of American Historians and was selected as the best novel of 1994 by Time magazine. His newest novel, Tomcat in Love (1998), is published by Broadway Books, a divsion of Random House.
http://www.amazon.co.jp/gp/product/product-description/0767902890/ref=dp_proddesc_0?ie=UTF8&n=52033011&s=english-books
