Fatal Light

By Richard Currey

A devastating portrait of war in all its horror, brutality, and mindlessness, this extraordinary novel is written in beautifully cadenced prose. A combat medic in Vietnam faces the chaos of war, set against the tranquil scenes of family life back home in small-town America.This young man's rite of passage is traced through jungle combat to malaria-induced fever visions to the purgatory of life in military-occupied Saigon.After returning home from war to stay with his grandfather, he confronts his own shattered personal history and the mysterious human capacity for renewal.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Santa Fe Writer's Project
• Release date: Apr 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9780981966120

Book preview

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Reviews for Fatal Light

[needmoreshelves · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Synopsis from the publisher:A devastating portrait of war in all its horror, brutality, and mindlessness, this extraordinary novel is written in beautifully cadenced prose. A combat medic in Vietnam faces the chaos of war, set against the tranquil scenes of family life back home in small-town America. This young man's rite of passage is traced through jungle combat to malaria-induced fever visions to the purgatory of life in military-occupied Saigon. After returning home from war to stay with his grandfather, he confronts his own shattered personal history and the mysterious human capacity for renewal.My thoughts:It's not often that the words "horrifying" and "beautiful" are the two words I think best describea novel, but that is how I feel after reading Fatal Light.Horrifying because this is, after all, a novel about war. The kind of war where men curse, and use drugs, and find prostitutes, and kill people. Lots and lots of people. There is nothing about this war that is romanticized or glossed over. It is harsh, and brutal, and horrifying.But also beautiful. There were moments while reading that I almost ached at the pictures Currey painted with his words."First look: sandbags and fog. And quiet. As if the fog itself were the carrier of silence easing among us, touching us, loving our faces.""Such things live together here, poetry and shotguns. Alive and well in a single body.""Once upon a time I had been in love with Mary Meade. Loving her was one of the things that kept me alive in a place where staying alive was hard to do, loving her resonant image, the effigy of our touch."This isn't an easy novel to read. It is presented as a series of short vignettes, in mostly linear order, about the narrator's life before, during, and shortly after his time in Vietnam. There were times I felt confused, not sure of where we were or what exactly was going on. This is a very internal novel, so while it is about war, there is not a lot of action to move the plot along - mostly we just drift with the narrator's memory, reading what he chooses to remember. At times I almost forgot I was reading a novel - it seemed SO personal, it was like peeking into someone's diary.Fatal Light is, however, the kind of book that will stay with you. Its insights into the horror and mindlessness of war are powerful. This edition is a 20th anniversary reprint, being issued by Santa Fe Writers Project. This is the third book I have read from this independent publisher, and they have each been unique and engrossing. It's director, Andrew Gifford, is a very cool guy - read more about his story here. His life could probably make quite a fascinating movie. Also, read the new intro to the book written by Richard Currey, specifically for this new edition here. He writes about his novel, "Fatal Light is a novel sheared down to the primary essentials of the story it tells and the spiritual predicament it describes, one that has no resolution, no solution, that joins the texture of a life and, as the unnamed young narrator of Fatal Light says at one point, sticks there "like a photograph on the spine." "Finished: 3/4/09Source: Santa Fe Writers ProjectRating: 6.5/10

[lexi2008 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This book was sent to me through LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program.Well, I'm just going to come out and say it. I didn't care for this book. I went into it hoping for an experience like that when I read Loon - where I didn't expect to like the book at all, but ended up loving it. However, it was not to be. I don't know if it was the way the book was written or what, but it did not resonate with me.The book is written in two different styles: one is a regular, everyday story-telling type of writing, but the other is this staccato, choppy, stream-of-consciousness style that I did NOT care for at all. I get that it is supposed to convey the confusion, weariness, and sadness that the nameless protagonist is experiencing during his time in Vietnam, but I couldn't get into it. Maybe that is because I felt like I couldn't relate to the narrator. We never learn his name or much about him, really. He loves a girl, he gets sent off to war, he has a family at home who miss him, he has strange wartime experiences in Vietnam, then he comes home. That's about it.Maybe I'm burnt out on Vietnam books, having read Loon not too long ago, and then Beach Music, which also had a Vietnam component to it. Maybe, as I suspect, I just don't like books about war. Maybe I don't like books about Vietnam. I just didn't feel like I connected with this book or learned much from it. Had I not known what an LZ was from reading Loon, I certainly wouldn't have found out by reading this book.Two out of five Whatevers. Recommended for people who like war books or Vietnam-era literature. Just not for me.2011-8

[msf59 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a spare, haunting novel about a young medic in Vietnam. The prose is stunning, shrouding a dark, disturbing vision of war and it's equally distressing aftermath, as the the soldier returns back home, confused and adrift.This is a passage as the young man fills out his discharge paperwork:"I recited my parent's address, a memory of empty roads and uneasy tranquility as I identified my home of record, the house I had grown up in and had give up as lost, as if I stared down a tunnel in a dream. As if my memories of a typical street in a typical town were only imagination, a legend of childhood deep in summers of rivers and old trees and trains, of distant voices."If you are a fan of Tim O'Brien's work, particularly The Things That They Carried, you should also love this book!

[tothewest_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book, the 20th anniversary edition of Fatal Light by Richard Currey, is an account of a transition from boyhood to war and then home again. Yet, although many books about war follow similar paths, Currey declines to focus on narrative. Rather, he evokes emotions and feelings in tiny snapshots of one participant's life during the Vietnam War. The result is a dream-like book, where episodes of the narrator's boyhood, his time on the battlefield, on leave in Saigon and on his first few days back home are told in the same style as his recounting of malarial delirium. If the result is a portrait of one man's experience of the war, Currey wields his brush sparingly, but each line is precisely placed.

Less concerned with narrative than with tone, Currey sometimes allows the reader to be confused. The reader may have some difficulty knowing which tales might be referred to later on, and which will merely fade away. Yet, I can't help but consider this a stylistic device, rather than a flaw. The disjointed narrative conveys the confusion the narrator feels throughout his time in the war and immediately after.

The prose is beautiful, even if the subject is ugly. I highly recommend this book.

[juliebean_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Curry was a poet before he became a novelist, and that is evident in the way that each and every word in this story is set down with purpose. Currey does an amazing job of creating impressions of what he felt and experienced, through his choice of words and their cadence. It's quite an impressive feat to sustain such writing for an entire novel. What this book lacks is major action scenes, in the sense of video game war scenes that appeal to our baser instincts. This book is more abstract, hinting at the violence that occurs off stage, while at the same time watching the suffering and death transform the characters before our eyes. Currey's novel is extraordinarily well done, and it deserves recognition among Vietnam novels for the well-crafted turns of phrase that populate its pages.

[illiniguy71 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A very skillfully written novel, but not without its faults. Its series of short incidents or remembrances do not make for a coherent narrative, although together they do leave a powerful impression. Only at the end do you learn that the protagonist's life was not entirely troublefree before he entered the army. Some of the details about entering the military do not square with my own memories of entering the army at the same time. But the author is correct. So many of us came back home both quite angry and entirely disoriented, especially those who had significant combat experience (which I, myself, did not). When I first read books about the Vietnam War a decade after returning home, they revived all the old anger and bitterness. Now, however skillfully done (as this one is), they simply remind me of a time far in the past. But I approached the last chapter of this work with some reluctance, because I knew the young soldier's attempt to re-enter civilian life would be in some ways his most difficult moment. However angry we returning Vietnam-era veterans were because of the long-continuing disruption of our lives, killing and maiming of our brothers, and slaughter of unsuspecting Vietnamese people because both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon lacked the political courage to simply pull us out of Vietnam when they realized America had no objectives that could be accomplished, we veterans also knew that this had likely been the most exciting time of our lives. We could not wait to return to our regular civilian lives, but when we did, every thing had changed. We were given the strength to endure the military through dreams of the civilian world we had left, and now that world had moved on while we were away. Richard Currey captures all of this in a very skillful way in just a few short pages.

[seriousgrace · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Sometimes the best review is simply the words, "READ THIS NOW!" To say that I didn't put it down is an understatement. I carried it with me and read it at every chance I got. When I was finished I read it again. After I read it a third time I still didn't put it down. I promptly handed it off to someone else and said, "read this. Now." Honestly, this was one of the most powerful books I have read in a long time.

[karenweyant · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Richard Currey's Fatal Light reads like a group of interlocking short stories about one character's journey through Vietnam. Set against a war landscape and memories of rural America, the novel introduces the reader to a young soldier who struggles to make sense of it all. The jump from scene to scene and action to action may seem to be a bit choppy, but the language, often minimal and poetic at the same time, makes up for the gaps in the story. It's easy to see why some readers deemed this novel as classic wartime literature.

[awriterspen_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Fatal Light is a book that brings to light the confuted experiences of war. A young eighteen year old draftee finds himself in Vietnam surrounded by beauty and death at the same time. He leaves behind a football scholarship to serve his country in an unpopular war. His father speaks of war as if it's a fun and manly thing to take a part in. I think the author does a great job of expressing this through short vignettes that are easy to digest one at a time. I took several weeks to finish this book and each time I picked it back up it was like I didn't miss a beat. This book might as realistically represent the feelings and experiences of an individual soldier in Vietnam as any book I've ever read. It's not the best Vietnam war novel I've read. History, especially Vietnam war history buffs will not find elaborate details but they will come to understand the narrator.

[ulfhjorr · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Currey's writing takes this collection of vignettes from potential mediocrity to a work of excellence. There is rather little in the way of a structured plot in Fatal Light, but how much is there in real life -- or even more specifically, in a war like that fought in Vietnam. Instead, we are treated to the language of a poet and the tortured soul of a boy turned into a man in the most hellish way imaginable.

[dyarington_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I was very disappointed in this book. After reading rave reviews,Ii was excited about starting it. What a letdown! It's just a series of short chapter vignettes following home to war and back. I did not find it riviting or intense , and only somewhat interesting. After 20 years of really great Viet Nam memories, this one falters greatly. Furthermore, the author admits that most of the book is pure fiction, not based on real experiences. I'm sorry it just left me mostly bored.

[whitewavedarling · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

If you're a fan of McEwan's Atonement, or of work in the style of Hemingway, this book might be for you. Having said that....it certainly wasn't for me.Currey's novel of a Vietnam soldier reads more like a half-hazard diary, despite the emphatic disclaimer that it is primarily fictionalized. On the whole, it's not badly done--the problem is, there are plenty of cliches, and everything that is accomplished in the novel has been done before, and better I'm afraid, to the extent that reading this was more of a rehashing of other Vietnam and Iraq based literature I've read than it was a fresh story. The further pain on the story is that when it comes down to it, it moves far too quickly to really draw a reader into a plot-line or to involve readers in the characters. Simply, from beginning to end, it's hard to care any more for the book than the care you would automatically bestow in any Vietnam-centered literature. If you're looking for a fresh perspective, this certainly isn't it.The problem on my end may be that I've read too much Vietnam and generally war-related literature to appreciate something that is emblematic, but less than fresh. If that's the case, so be it, but this isn't a book I'd recommend. For me, it was too stylized and half-hazard to reach me, and in the end, I was simply bored for far too much of the reading time.

[angrystarlyt · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Although the language in this novel is gorgeous, I felt disconnected from the main action, and from the main character's feelings, motivations, etc. Perhaps the introduction daunted me by saying that it was a different kind of Vietnam novel, and that it was written by a very angry young man; I read looking for both of these and couldn't find either, feeling like I couldn't connect with the author because I wasn't there.Again, the book was appealing, and I read it in one sitting, but it was difficult for me to connect emotionally with this.

[lisalynne_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is the 20th Anniversary re-issue of Fatal Light, "one of the best works of fiction to emerge from the Vietnam war." The writing is beautiful, almost lyrical in its descriptions of countryside and confusion, love and horror. The book is told in fragments, chapters as short as a paragraph, cryptic love letters home, conversations with fellow soldiers taken out of all context; it emphasizes the disjointed nature of such memories. They are tied to an event, a vision, a smell - they give you the feeling of a life flashing in front of your eyes. It's sad, but not the sort of sad that makes you weep over the final pages - it's something slower, that creeps up on you, as this young man witnesses horror after horror and becomes numb to them.

[timbazzett · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This morning I finished reading Richard Currey’s Fatal Light, a novel of the Vietnam War first published more than twenty-five years ago. The edition I have is a handsome 20th anniversary reprint from Santa Fe Writers Project (a small press that has a fascinating story of its own). Currey’s novel is a slight thing, only 170 pages, but it is perhaps one of the most deeply affecting Vietnam novels I have ever read, and I have read many books to come out of that war, both fiction and memoirs. I often wonder why I am so drawn to books about Vietnam, as well as those about other wars, from World War I all the way to the wars of today. And I think maybe it’s because I feel a certain amount of survivor’s guilt for having missed “my war,” - Vietnam. A “war baby,” born in 1944, I would have been prime cannon fodder for that jungle war. In fact, if I had gone from high school to college I might very well have been drafted after I finished, or dropped out - because there are so many ‘ifs’ in this conversation I continue to have with myself. In any case, I was not drafted. Clueless and ignorant of what was already happening in southeast Asia in 1962, I enlisted in the army right out of high school and spent the next three years doing the innocently disreputable kinds of things most young men do when they are far from home for the first time - growing up, I suppose. I did tours in northern Turkey and southern Germany, where I mostly enjoyed myself and made friendships that have endured to this day. I was discharged from the army in August of 1965, at a time when tens of thousands of additional American troops were being dispatched to the fight in Vietnam.Richard Currey, five years younger than I, was drafted out of Washington, D.C., in 1968, at the height of the war-protests and marches. Hoping to avoid the ground war, he enlisted in the Navy, but he ended up in the jungle anyway, a combat medic attached to a Marine reconnaissance unit. Fatal Light is the artistic result of that experience. In an e-mail exchange I had with him, Currey emphasized, however, that his tour in Vietnam -“... only peripherally informs my novel, First Light, which is completely about the psychological elements of serving in harm’s way. I wanted to tell the time-honored story of Boy-Goes-To-War, but in a different way and with a different voice than more traditional war novels had approached similar material. I tried to dive a little deeper into the personal and emotional in the novel rather than re-play the straight-up tropes of the combat tale.”Well, he has certainly succeeded on all counts, because the personal, emotional and psychological elements take center stage in this tale told by a young combat medic, unnamed - a useful device in that, being nameless, he becomes Everyman, giving a voice to every young man who served in that green hell and returned home scarred in various and horrific ways.I should tell you, however, that in choosing to focus on the inner effects of combat, Currey does not - cannot - completely ignore the more traumatic physical aspects. A particularly moving scene, for example, is one where the narrator’s close friend, Linderman, takes a shotgun blast at close range, leaving his chest “a matted heap of bloody meat” -“He tried to speak. When he did, a whisper. ‘God, man. Don’t let me go.’I cradled his head.‘Strange,’ Linderman whispered. ‘I’m young.’‘Yeah. We all are.’ ...I reached behind him, lifting his body off the ground, embracing him. He looked at me, his eyes clear and troubled, and he said, ‘Now I’m gonna cry. What a goddam thing.’‘Go ahead,’ I said. ‘I’ve got you. I’m with you.” ...And Linderman was dead.”My own eyes brimmed with tears at reading this passage, and it was not the only time. Because Currey’s vivid descriptions of the destruction of lives so brief, so “young” in a war so ill-conceived cannot help but evoke strong emotional responses.In another passage, Currey’s medic-narrator, wounded and returned to duty, is later hospitalized with malaria and is tormented by fevered nightmares of all he has seen -“Dreams careened, haunted, collided, and I was always forced to look: the double amputees, incinerated faces with lips burned off and teeth locked in satanic grins, bodies in decay and distended with gas, fingers and noses and ears rat-gnawed, the ones floating face down in paddies pulled out after days with tongues and eyeballs protruding from macerated skulls, and their gunshot wounds looing so innocent, so simple.”How does one sanely survive experiences like these? Because Currey’s narrator came from small-town West Virginia on the banks of the Ohio, where he enjoyed a happy, normal childhood and remembers -“... the voluptuous spread of summer darkness as my brother and sisters and I ran into dusk, the flare of our cries running with the blink of fireflies, careen and cascade of breath, and the bright gasp of lightning behind clouds before thunder began in the distance ... Later, from our beds, we heard the rain begin and grow and rush over the countryside, an intense whisper, and the smell of water and wet earth was everywhere like a destiny, steaming in the moon’s white voice.”. Gorgeous prose passages like this are not surprising, given that Currey began his writing life as a poet. Glimpses into the narrator’s boyhood on the Ohio, fishing and playing with his brother and friends, evoke images of Tom and Huck and Twain’s Mississippi. I was also reminded of other Vietnam books I have read over the past forty-plus years, beginning with books like Ron Kovic’s searing memoir, Born on the Fourth of July, or The Big V, William Pelfrey’s ground-breaking first novel by a combat veteran of that war. And another random passage describing a mangy stray dog encountered in a Saigon bar brought to mind Tracy Kidder’s adopted stray in his Vietnam memoir, My Detachment. And one more, because of the young narrator’s final meditative dream of nine men walking, walking in the jungle. It was the nine men that got me, because of the “Old Army Prayer” -F**k ‘em all but nine -Six for pall bearers,Two for roadguards,And one to count cadence.One to Count Cadence, James Crumley’s fine cult-favorite novel of the Army Security Agency in early Vietnam, is one I have read more than once, and its dark craziness is complementary to the horror depicted in Currey’s Fatal Light.One final note, a personal one. Currey’s narrator had a close relationship with his grandfather, Earl McFail, who was the first family member he visited upon his return from Vietnam. I found the chapters on this time to be every bit as moving as the ones in the jungle and Saigon. Because Earl McFail is seventy-one, and he watched his son go off to the Korean War, and then his grandson to Vietnam. When I began reading books about Vietnam and other wars I was young, in my twenties, and I could always relate to what the young protagonists were going through. Now I am seventy, a grandfather. My perspective has changed. “I’ve looked at life from both sides now,” as the song says. I could feel what Earl McFail felt when he embraced his grandson, returned from the war.Currey waited nearly twenty years to get his novel down on paper. Not quite as long as Karl Marlantes took with Matterhorn, but I think Currey got it right. I concur with Tim O’Brien. Fatal Light is perhaps one of the best damn books to ever come out of Vietnam. I give it my highest recommendation.

[juliette07_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

‘A young man lifted from an innocent life, plunged into the fear and rabid confusion of war, and then, surviving it, left to pick up his own pieces on the long way home’ writes the author writes in his 2009 introduction to this slim work reflecting the power, the strength and yet the fragility of the human spirit. A Vietnam veteran he first wrote this work at the age of twenty and in this new ‘20th Anniversary edition’ he expresses the hope that his universal experience will speak to the “Iraq and Afghanistan Generation”. This is a book that takes the reader on an emotional journey to war and beyond – it speaks to the reader here and now of the big questions of life. I really enjoyed his style of writing and found that through imagery and a poetic style it often took me to my own relationships and life experiences. This is a work that reflects the ugliness of war yet is beautiful in so many ways. I highly recommend this book of apparent contradictions.

[booksloth_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

To be honest, I immediately forgot that I'd requested this book from the Early Reviewers scheme and was so surprised to find I'd been awarded it that I contacted Abby to ask if it was too late to refuse it. What a minor miracle it was that I was, indeed, too late. I thought this book was a real little gem. Based on the author's own experiences as a conscript in Vietnam, this is a short book that reads in many ways more like a cross between poetry and a colection of verbal snapshots. It rather made me wonder why other authors write several hundred pages on their own real or imagined experiences of this war when Currey managed it so well with such brevity. I found the book both moving and shocking in turn and, especially for readers who aren't necessarilly drawn to longer works on the subject of war, this is a worthy introduction to the subject and one that will haunt me for quite a while.

[squeakychu · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Fatal Light is a short and poetic war book. It is about one man’s experience before, during and after the Viet Nam war. It reveals itself in vignettes, like individual photographs which one sees while understanding there are deeper truths and stories not revealed. For this reason, Currey's story is perhaps not as fulfilling as other war novels I’ve read. It leaves me a bit puzzled and wanting to know more of what happens before and after a few particularly gruesome scenes. This book is a 20th anniversary publication. I can see how this novel would have been right on the money as a top read soon after the Viet Nam war. That war was such an in-your-face one for the American people. Perhaps some Americans who lived through the Viet Nam war era do not wish to relive all of that war's ugliness and brutality. However, I think that, in light of how Americans view current wars (Afghanistan, Iraq), they need to read more details to feel as much passion about this topic as they did in the 60's and 70's. As war memories fade, what ultimately does pop through are snippets. This book presents those to the reader, but the lack of a more fully developed plot makes the story feel a bit disconnected.In reading war stories, I always like to know about the soldier as a person first. This appears more in the opening and closing chapters than in those of the battlefield. To me, those particular chapters, especially the ones about the young man's relationship with his grandfather, are the most poignant and deeply touching of the story.