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The Speed of Light A Novel La Velocidad de la luz Javier Cercas Anne McLean Books

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The Speed of Light A Novel La Velocidad de la luz Javier Cercas Anne McLean Books

Conceptually, this book had much appeal. A view of the American War in Vietnam, from a Spanish perspective. Less emotional baggage, so perhaps it would ring truer, was the hope. Then there was the matter of his most famous work, Soldiers of Salamis, highly touted by a fellow Amazon reviewer, and with a strong cord that appealed. The book is concerned with events in the Spanish Civil War, but the title reflected the author's theme that in contemporary Spain, those who fought in the Civil War were as remote and irrelevant to the present as the soldiers who fought in the Battle of Salamis, in 480 BC. The same theme seems to apply to American society, and those who had fought in the Vietnam War. Finally, there was the matter of Urbana, Illinois, where much of the novel is set, and where I spent a couple wonderful days when the dogwood were abloom in 2008, wandering the streets, as a "bennie" for giving a few talks at the University.

The narrator is an aspiring and struggling writer in Barcelona, who manages to obtain a teaching position in the Spanish department at the University of Illinois. His office-partner is Rodney Falk, the proverbial, and VERY stereotypical "troubled Vietnam War veteran." The novel's narrative thread involves the protagonist developing a friendship with Rodney, and his attempts to unravel his "troubled" past, with scenes in America, Vietnam and Spain.

Regrettably, what the author dishes out is the wildest Hollywood phantasmagoria of the American war in Vietnam, and its participants. He gets it wrong at virtually EVERY level...from the small details, to the chronology, and most importantly, to the motivation and actions of Rodney. The chapter is entitled "Stars and Stripes," named after the military newspaper that was distributed in Vietnam, and still exists. Cercas says: "...much-handled letters that carried US Army postmarks, letters from Saigon and Da Nang and Xuan Loc and Quang Ngai, from various parts of the Batagan peninsula..." There were no postmarks, there were no stamps, all the mail was "free." On page 78, Rodney's brother, Bob enlisted in the Marine Corps, and arrived in Saigon as part of the First Infantry (?) Division. But on the next page, Bob "enlisted in the army." So, which is it? Cercas never says what Rodney's MOS (military occupational specialty is... military jargon for his job). But he lands an extremely cushy job, including escorting Bob Hope around! There is the Saigon bar scene, and Rodney's kindness to the Vietnamese bar maid later saves his life, since, of course, she is VC, and there is a "terrorist attack"... and she gets him out of the way at the last minute. Pleeeez! But it gets much worse...

Despite Rodney's prior reading, and his anti-war stance, and despite the fact that most everyone else was trying to get out of the field (which Cercas calls "the front"), after brother Bob's death stepping on a land-mine, with his Vietnam tour almost over, Rodney volunteers for a combat unit... where he spends all of 1969. Did any of his fellow soldiers mock him for that? Weren't that concerned that this untrained "FNG" might get them killed? Cercas never says. So, we have the Saigon images, and then all the rest, compliments of Hollywood, and they naturally all happen to and around Rodney. The VC who are thrown out of the helicopter for not talking (a true enough incident). Rodney is in an elite platoon (Tiger Force!??) in, naturally, the 101st Airborne, and winds up at My Lai (which the author calls My Khe, after a nearby village...but hey, wasn't that the Americal Division?... and didn't that happen in March, 1968, when Rodney was in Saigon?) Rodney's favorite memento is his engraved lighter (for burning all those hootches?) Finally, in terms of the "clichés of horror" Cercas even works in "the ears," as in, "Tiger force"... "...acquired a reputation among the local population for wearing around their necks, like necklaces of war that brutally commemorated their victims, collections of human ears strung together on shoelaces." In the author's note at the end, he attributes the influence of Michael Herr's Dispatches. And on page 199, of "Dispatches," Herr claims: "...a picture of a Marine holding an ear or maybe two ears or, as in the case of a guy I knew near Pleiku, a whole necklace made of ears, `love beads' as its owner called them...half the combat troops in Vietnam had these things in their packs, snapshots were the least of what they took after a fight, at least pictures didn't rot." Yes, no less than HALF the combat troops!

Even Rodney's way home was impossible (p. 109). Saigon to Tokyo, then the Philippines to San Francisco!? The author is still not done with the clichés of war though, `cause, if you haven't guessed it by now, a hippie spits on him as soon as he gets off the plane. Clearly The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam by Jerry Lembcke is missing from the author's bibliography. And the denouement? Semi-spoiler alert! What should be called "the final cliché." The ending in The Deer Hunter [Blu-ray + DVD] (Universal's 100th Anniversary),Coming Home,Heaven and Earth, and no doubt many more, the final solution for the "troubled."

In Barbara Tuckman's The Guns of August she relates how a mass psychosis swept through England in August, 1914. British troops were being hammered on the Western front, in the face of the numerical superior Germans. So, seemingly the entire country subscribed to the belief that the "limitless" manpower of Russia was coming to their rescue, and that Russian troops were passing through England to reinforce the Western Front. Of course, none of it was true. Likewise, with Vietnam, and America's explanation of its participation there. In the popular imagination is promoted images of utter fantasy supported by elements and incidents of real truth, that focus the "horror" of the war on the "grunts" who got uptight and personal, meanwhile, deflecting the blame from the planners and managers in Washington, as well as that DOW chemical scientist who developed the compound to make the napalm stick to the skin...

Cercas IS good writer, but why oh why wouldn't he have run his manuscript by an actual Vietnam War veteran, many of whom have memories, but do not fit the stereotype of "troubled"? Cercas clearly overreached, a bridge, much, much too far. 1-star for this deplorable fantasy.


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The Speed of Light A Novel La Velocidad de la luz Javier Cercas Anne McLean Books Reviews

I bought this book without knowing anything about Javier Cercas or his work. I'm a big fan of a Peruvian author, Jaime Bayly, and somewhere I read that he liked this Cercas guy. After finishing this novel, first of all, thanks Jaime, and secondly I sincerely recommend to anyone who reads this review to read this novel. I will surely buy other books of Mr. Cercas (just as I finish writing this review which is not really a review).
Having now made five or six attempts at beginning this review, I am coming to the conclusion that THE SPEED OF LIGHT is a particularly difficult book to review. So I will try a somewhat pointillistic approach and hope that some sort of picture emerges.

There are two protagonists. First, the anonymous narrator, who is a writer from Barcelona. At the time of his tale (2005?), he is in his forties. The second is Rodney Falk, a Vietnam war veteran who spent the 35 years after the war trying to put his war experiences behind him and somehow carve out a stable life for himself. The two of them meet in the late '80s when they share an office as teaching assistants in the Spanish Department at the University of Illinois in Urbana. Against all odds, they end up forging a friendship, albeit a strange and sometimes strained one.

There are two main settings Barcelona and its environs, and Urbana, Illinois and a town not far away, Rantoul. The first half of the story takes place in the late '80s, with much of that consisting of the narrator learning some (but not all) of Rodney Falk's harrowing and traumatic experiences in Vietnam. The second half of the novel takes place around 2002 to 2004, when Rodney Falk reappears in the narrator's life after 14 years and the narrator learns even more about his time in Vietnam.

The novel is elaborately plotted. It also is ornately told. It is marked (some might say "marred") by long, baroque sentences, many lengthened by numerous conjunctions, others by a thicket of subordinate clauses. In my opinion, it is over-written.

The theme that almost all readers will note and remember has to do with the American experience in Vietnam and how it scarred so many of the American soldiers who survived the fighting. It is both astonishing and disconcerting to find a Spaniard writing so close to the raw quick about that episode of the American experience, both in Southeast Asia and here at home. I believe THE SPEED OF LIGHT to be a worthy addition to the literature of Vietnam and its aftermath in the United States.

Another theme has to do with success and failure in one's career, and since the narrator is a writer, the question of success and failure for him also entails the questions of what it is to be a writer and what's more important to a novel -- the telling or the truth. I found this theme much less convincingly or memorably handled.

Yet another theme or issue -- not as obvious as the first two or as persistent -- concerns the ethics of journalism. A question posed by the novel is which is more important, people or The Truth? When, for example, journalists get on the trail of a 35-year-old story about Tiger Force, an autonomous U.S. platoon that essentially acted as an American guerrilla force, are there any ethical qualms about hounding, in the name of The Truth, former American soldiers who have struggled for years to put the past behind them and for whom publicity will ruin them? (To my mind, it is a somewhat loaded question -- because The Truth is an illusion. That doesn't mean that journalists or historians should not make a valiant effort to approximate it nonetheless, but it does mean, to me, that there are ethical limits to that effort, that individual lives should not be cavalierly sacrificed before the altar of The Truth.)

One last comment Is it just me (or a statistical aberration pertaining to the modern novels I have recently been reading), or has it become vogue to tell novels through an anonymous first-person narrator? This device is not limited to those writing in Spanish (my beloved and esteemed W.G. Sebald employs it, although his narrator is more a spectator than an active protagonist in the traditional sense), but it does seem to be particularly prevalent in Spanish-language fiction. I can well understand the attractions of writing in the first person, but I don't understand what is gained by denying that first-person narrator a name. Furthermore, the device is becoming somewhat hackneyed.

THE SPEED OF LIGHT has many flaws -- too many to keep me from giving it five stars. But it has considerable merits as well, and -- in keeping with the ambivalent nature of this review -- I don't mean to discourage anyone from reading it.
Guilt-If you lived in the sixties and saw your friends leaving to fight a war regarded by most as not an Australian War- you experienced a Government which had promised to never introduce conscription- you saw how the troops on their return to Australian soil were shunned, ignored, detested and misunderstood - you will be able to identify with the book's words...as if we shared a shameful secret or the responsibility of a crime. This experience belonged not only to Australians but as the novel describes, to young idealistic men of the USA and their families. So Guilt is not so difficult to understand...finding guilty parties is very easy; the difficult thing is accepting that there aren't any.
A story so well told that I have read it twice before reviewing it. Many wise words about life and living are attributed to the main character- words relative to living life,to dying and to the beginner writer. This is such a great book that even though most consists of 'telling' rather than 'showing' as all writers in Australia are often preached about, I never lost interest and felt the characters to be real and their experience to be totally believable whether of American or Spanish origin.
Conceptually, this book had much appeal. A view of the American War in Vietnam, from a Spanish perspective. Less emotional baggage, so perhaps it would ring truer, was the hope. Then there was the matter of his most famous work, Soldiers of Salamis, highly touted by a fellow reviewer, and with a strong cord that appealed. The book is concerned with events in the Spanish Civil War, but the title reflected the author's theme that in contemporary Spain, those who fought in the Civil War were as remote and irrelevant to the present as the soldiers who fought in the Battle of Salamis, in 480 BC. The same theme seems to apply to American society, and those who had fought in the Vietnam War. Finally, there was the matter of Urbana, Illinois, where much of the novel is set, and where I spent a couple wonderful days when the dogwood were abloom in 2008, wandering the streets, as a "bennie" for giving a few talks at the University.

The narrator is an aspiring and struggling writer in Barcelona, who manages to obtain a teaching position in the Spanish department at the University of Illinois. His office-partner is Rodney Falk, the proverbial, and VERY stereotypical "troubled Vietnam War veteran." The novel's narrative thread involves the protagonist developing a friendship with Rodney, and his attempts to unravel his "troubled" past, with scenes in America, Vietnam and Spain.

Regrettably, what the author dishes out is the wildest Hollywood phantasmagoria of the American war in Vietnam, and its participants. He gets it wrong at virtually EVERY level...from the small details, to the chronology, and most importantly, to the motivation and actions of Rodney. The chapter is entitled "Stars and Stripes," named after the military newspaper that was distributed in Vietnam, and still exists. Cercas says "...much-handled letters that carried US Army postmarks, letters from Saigon and Da Nang and Xuan Loc and Quang Ngai, from various parts of the Batagan peninsula..." There were no postmarks, there were no stamps, all the mail was "free." On page 78, Rodney's brother, Bob enlisted in the Marine Corps, and arrived in Saigon as part of the First Infantry (?) Division. But on the next page, Bob "enlisted in the army." So, which is it? Cercas never says what Rodney's MOS (military occupational specialty is... military jargon for his job). But he lands an extremely cushy job, including escorting Bob Hope around! There is the Saigon bar scene, and Rodney's kindness to the Vietnamese bar maid later saves his life, since, of course, she is VC, and there is a "terrorist attack"... and she gets him out of the way at the last minute. Pleeeez! But it gets much worse...

Despite Rodney's prior reading, and his anti-war stance, and despite the fact that most everyone else was trying to get out of the field (which Cercas calls "the front"), after brother Bob's death stepping on a land-mine, with his Vietnam tour almost over, Rodney volunteers for a combat unit... where he spends all of 1969. Did any of his fellow soldiers mock him for that? Weren't that concerned that this untrained "FNG" might get them killed? Cercas never says. So, we have the Saigon images, and then all the rest, compliments of Hollywood, and they naturally all happen to and around Rodney. The VC who are thrown out of the helicopter for not talking (a true enough incident). Rodney is in an elite platoon (Tiger Force!??) in, naturally, the 101st Airborne, and winds up at My Lai (which the author calls My Khe, after a nearby village...but hey, wasn't that the Americal Division?... and didn't that happen in March, 1968, when Rodney was in Saigon?) Rodney's favorite memento is his engraved lighter (for burning all those hootches?) Finally, in terms of the "clichés of horror" Cercas even works in "the ears," as in, "Tiger force"... "...acquired a reputation among the local population for wearing around their necks, like necklaces of war that brutally commemorated their victims, collections of human ears strung together on shoelaces." In the author's note at the end, he attributes the influence of Michael Herr's Dispatches. And on page 199, of "Dispatches," Herr claims "...a picture of a Marine holding an ear or maybe two ears or, as in the case of a guy I knew near Pleiku, a whole necklace made of ears, `love beads' as its owner called them...half the combat troops in Vietnam had these things in their packs, snapshots were the least of what they took after a fight, at least pictures didn't rot." Yes, no less than HALF the combat troops!

Even Rodney's way home was impossible (p. 109). Saigon to Tokyo, then the Philippines to San Francisco!? The author is still not done with the clichés of war though, `cause, if you haven't guessed it by now, a hippie spits on him as soon as he gets off the plane. Clearly The Spitting Image Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam by Jerry Lembcke is missing from the author's bibliography. And the denouement? Semi-spoiler alert! What should be called "the final cliché." The ending in The Deer Hunter [Blu-ray + DVD] (Universal's 100th Anniversary),Coming Home,Heaven and Earth, and no doubt many more, the final solution for the "troubled."

In Barbara Tuckman's The Guns of August she relates how a mass psychosis swept through England in August, 1914. British troops were being hammered on the Western front, in the face of the numerical superior Germans. So, seemingly the entire country subscribed to the belief that the "limitless" manpower of Russia was coming to their rescue, and that Russian troops were passing through England to reinforce the Western Front. Of course, none of it was true. Likewise, with Vietnam, and America's explanation of its participation there. In the popular imagination is promoted images of utter fantasy supported by elements and incidents of real truth, that focus the "horror" of the war on the "grunts" who got uptight and personal, meanwhile, deflecting the blame from the planners and managers in Washington, as well as that DOW chemical scientist who developed the compound to make the napalm stick to the skin...

Cercas IS good writer, but why oh why wouldn't he have run his manuscript by an actual Vietnam War veteran, many of whom have memories, but do not fit the stereotype of "troubled"? Cercas clearly overreached, a bridge, much, much too far. 1-star for this deplorable fantasy.