In the Lake of the Woods

Rating:
Summary: It stays with you.
Review: Tim O'Brien created an unnerving and haunting fever dream/novel. It may confound some readers of his Vietman works. It's a creepy and rewarding trip through some very dark recesses of the mind.

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Summary: What is Truth and What is Illusion?
Review: Tim O'Brien has written a novel that successfully explores the question of what is truth and illusion. Is an event the truth because it happens or is the truth what we believe happens? John Wade and his wife Kathy are recovering from a devastating political defeat at an isolated cabin on the shores of a Minnesota lake. One morning John awakens to find Kathy gone and the mystery begins or so the reader thinks.
Kathy's disappearance is the surface mystery, while the real mystery in this story is what has made John Wade the man he really is. Is he the slick politician and loving husband that he appears to be or is he a murderer? O'Brien reveals slowly through the book that John Wade was a lonely boy who was taunted by an alcoholic father, who then retreats into a world of magic tricks and illusions. After his father commits suicide, he creates the father he always wanted by envisioning him in his mind behind the "mirrors" he has put up to block the painful memories. Later, O'Brien begins to tell a stunningly graphic and horrifying tale of Wade's tour as a soldier in Viet Nam. The reader is thrown again and again into the agonziing re- telling of his memories of the My Lai Massacre. Wade's personna as the "Sorcerer" helps him endure these memories without going crazy. Wade covers up this event both psychologically and phyically by altering the records, but eventually things unravel when the fact of this incident becomes public.
O'Brien brilliantly uses third person narrative with fictionalized "interviews" from friends, family and people who knew the Wades as well as accounts of the investigation into the My Lai Massacre and finally different quotes from various historical events to give a real feeling to his work. As a reader you are drawn into this story as if you are reading a real event in the newspaper, it gives it a very eerie quality. There is a narrator of this story, not displayed in the traditional sense, but by small comments that appear in the footnotes of the interviews and finally taking a larger role in the end of the novel, perhaps echoing the readers point of view.
This is not a mystery in the traditional sense and frustrating to some readers may be the fact that there is not a tidy ending. There are no neat conclusions and the reader is left to ponder as is the narrator, the various hypothesis and eventual outcome of John and Kathy. This is a unique, dark tale that is more about the human psyche, the tricks we play ,secrets we keep and as in the story, there are no neat endings.

Rating:
Summary: How disgraceful!
Review: ... I felt the author hide his writing and storyline behind his continuous use of profanity and religious blasphemy. Did it add to the novel to constantly have the character chant "Kill Jesus". I mean really, was it necessary? ...

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Summary: makes sense to me
Review: This book dances around the idea of "What is the Truth?" "What is Illusion?" And "What happens when you can no longer fool people or yourself?"

It dances from guesses to quotes to "objective" facts to narrative in an attempt to find this truth.

I had no trouble with the lack of a conclusive ending. I think that the author wanted us to take a journey with a man who had a certain history........and by being on the journey, know the man and what he had done.

The point being: It is hard to believe the atrosities that were committed in Vietnam (but they happened)........and even harder to believe the atrosities committed in the Lake of the Woods.

Rating:
Summary: From a student's perspective...
Review: Horrible. Simply and utterly horrible.
Note: My class mates and I were forced to study this atrocious book and subsequently fould it to clumsy in its attempt to be ambiguous and different. Not a novel that one would want to read for sheer entertainment.

Rating:
Summary: Great writing and story overcome unsatisfying ending
Review: Well written and fascinating are the descriptions that first come to my mind in reviewing this book. The main characters are interesting, but not very likable. The story is suspenseful and terrifying, but not resolved. I gave the book 5 stars for the quality of writing and its unusual style, but I have to admit that the conclusion did not add to my enjoyment of it. Maybe it had to be the way it was because the main character was a magician and we could not really know the secret to his trick. Still, I'm not generally a big fan of the "pick your own ending" writing style. And, I have to admit that the ending of this story left me disappointed.

However, I so enjoyed the journey to the ending and so admired Tim O'Brien's terrific writing that took me there, that I have to recommend the book. I don't think it is as good as If I Die in a Combat Zone, but it shows a versatility of writing that is quite impressive. References to My Lai are probably better appreciated if the reader has done other reading about what happened there and who the real characters were. Otherwise, the storyline should appeal to almost any mystery fan.

Rating:
Summary: A Different Sort of O'Brien Book
Review: "In the Lake of the Woods" is a different sort of Tim O'Brien book, but I think it is almost as good as his previous works.

"In the Lake of the Woods" is an atmospheric mystery that is not set in Vietnam, but one in which Vietnam still plays a significant role.

After a devastating political loss, John Wade and his wife, Kathy, retreat to their cabin in the Minnesota woods to relax and regroup. Once at the cabin, however, things go terribly wrong. John, a Vietnam veteran, has been harboring a terrible secret, a secret that destroyed his political career and is now, perhaps, threatening his very life...and Kathy's.

When Kathy disappears, it is John who becomes the prime suspect, and not without good cause. But is he a murderer? Or is he, instead, a worried husband, tormented by the horrors of his past? This is the central question around which this book revolves and this is the mystery that must be solved in the Minnesota woods.

"In the Lake of the Woods" is a complex, psychological novel that deals with the lingering repercussions of war on the day-to-day life of the participants. Whether John Wade did nor did not have a hand in the disappearance of his wife is of less importance to this story than is his deteriorating mental state.

Tim O'Brien is a first-rate writer. His work may not be your cup of tea, but his prose is always near perfect. I did not think the characterization in this book was as stong as in O'Brien's previous work and because of that, I couldn't care about the characters as much. There was something artificial about them, especially Kathy, that prevented me from becoming deeply involved with them. The weaker (but still good) characterization is the reason I gave this book four stars instead of five.

A warning: those readers who require a neat and tidy ending won't find it here. A neat and tidy ending really isn't important in this book. What is important is that we feel a sense of satisfaction at the book's end. I certainly felt that with "In the Lake of the Woods."

To those readers who believe that reading anything with a "Vietnam theme" is passe, don't worry. Vietnam really doesn't take center stage here. This is not a war novel.

This book isn't a light, entertaining read, it's a dark and disturbing one instead. Multilayered, complex and complicated, "In the Lake of the Woods" is a book that will haunt you long after you've finished the last page.

Rating:
Summary: I hesitated about recommending this book...
Review: ...but it is so powerfully written, and some of the scenes -- particularly the more horrific ones -- are so vivid that I had to recommend it solely on that basis. (I won't reveal the particulars of one very powerful scene, but I am sure that the grotesque events described in excruciating detail will stay with me for a very long time.) The main problem I had with this book is that it focuses almost completely on two incidents in the main character's life -- his participation in the massacre at My Lai during the Vietnam War, and his wife's disappearance from an isolated cabin at a northern Minnesota lake many years ago. Granted these are the pivotal events of John Wade's life (as is the suicide of his father, which is also constantly touched upon), but the narrative constantly circles these two events, so that after several chapters, it feels as if you are going over the same ground over and over again. You crave some new information, and the horror loses its power to horrify, particularly in the Vietnam scenes. The book spirals back out of this pattern at the end when it becomes very dark, very disturbing and very engrossing yet again. Another reason I liked this book was its narrative structure; it reads like the unfinished manuscript by a frustrated true-crime writer. This unnamed writer gradually becomes another character in the story whose obsession with what happened at the Lake of the Woods and the mystery of Kathy Wade's disappearance drives the story forward. At the end, this mystery is never neatly solved, which may annoy some readers, but I enjoyed the ambiguity and the opportunity to make up my own mind about what happened between this husband and wife in the dark night.

Rating:
Summary: Super read, but frustrating, too
Review: This is the first of Tim O'Brien's books I've read. Although I don't regret having read it, and it's beautifully written, I have to say that I found the ending to be most frustrating. O'Brien seems to leave up to the reader exactly how the tension in the book is resolved and while that may work for some, it didn't work for me. I like my loose ends neatly tied up, and that doesn't happen here. Still, there is much to recommend it. The reader has to work with this book--it is told from sundry points of view, all of which make the characters come vividly to life. The flashbacks and oblique references to the main character's former interest in magic makes for fascinating subplot, and both greatly enhance our understanding of what makes him tick. The main character's foray into plant care (I can't be more specific or I'll give something important away) inspires the same level of horrifically scary chill one gets reading in Stephen King's "The Shining" that the main character's novel consists of nothing other than the sentence, "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" over and over and over again. I found the "interview" tidbits to be distracting, but they do enrich the novel with additional points of view. Is it a love story? A story of moral and political corruption? A Vietnam cautionary tale? It's all of these and more.

Rating:
Summary: i read this book for a report
Review: this book was good but it said sweared too much and the interview parts seem to repeat over and over, but it made me wanna keep reading because i wanted to know want hapened to kathy, 300 pages long, it was just right for me, but i think this is for an advanced reader because i did't really catch on at first like the first 150 pages this was really confusing me all the kathy said then john said was confusing me, and i needed a better vision and setting than just minnesota in the lake of the woods, but i think i won't be dissapionted with this book well off to do my report bye,