“With this recitation of paraphernalia and detritus, O'Brien manages to encapsulate the experience of an army and of a particular war, of a mined and booby-trapped landscape, of cold nights and hot days, of soaking monsoons and rice paddies, and of the possibility of being shot, like Ted Lavender, suddenly and out of nowhere: not only in the middle of a sentence but in the midst of a subordinate clause.”

— Francine Prose, book Reading Like a Writer

Reading Like a Writer, ch. 3, p. 57 (2006) (referring to a passage in The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien)

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Francine Prose7

American writer 1947

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