| Francois Truffaut said that it was impossible to make an antiwar film. The imagery and comraderie between soldiers generated a sense of action and growth, an experience that nobody would want to dismiss.
Perhaps that’s why Danielle Trussoni’s memoir Falling Through the Earth (Henry Holt, 240 pp.) works so well – it’s a story of both the relationship she had with her father and the one she had with his war. Seen through her eyes, the Vietnam War is an entity that cut its way through her father’s stomach and into his brain, always keeping him in a rigid, post-pubescent frame of mind.
Memoirs are an attractive medium to work in – visceral, adding extra credit to what, if fictionalized, may only provide a brief punch of emotion. It would be easy to say that Trussoni only wrote this book to capitalize on a war that, long ago, became its own theatrical prop. Aside from negating her technical ability, which is fantastic, it reminds one of the few volumes – like Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life and Jim Caroll’s The Basketball Diaries – that encroach upon issues greater than themselves, because, through their pain, they’ve earned the right to.
Trussoni’s father Dan was a tunnel rat in the Vietnam War, a deadly job that, statistically, raised his chances of death tenfold. For the little extra pay, he crawled deep into the earth, looking for Viet Cong and prisoners. In her 20s, Trussoni travelled to Vietnam and had the experience of descending into those tunnels herself. The heat, muddled breathing and absence of light fill her mind, as she wonders what it would be like to be there and worry about somebody drawing a knife over her face.
Which her father must have thought about long after the war ended. Dan weaves a history of broken wives and marriages, violence and drinking. Trussoni doesn’t excuse any of it, and her decision to stay with him through her childhood and adolescence, while superficially masochistic, belies a greater sense of what she admired in her father and herself. Late nights fighting, running from the cops – none of it healthy, in any sense of the word – but analyzed and understood.
How many men, easily spouting jingoistic bravado, realize that those who seek to perpetuate the myths of war use their families like fleshy, disposable agitprop? Vietnam will always have a firm hold on the modern psyche, not only because America lost, but because the essential façade the West uses to support its hegemony was exposed by the public – and, as history has shown, spun into a show of hippy heroics, the reality of severed ears and burned children rendered meaningless.
After all, honour thy dead, and if someone like Dan keeps photos of soldiers he killed in an old milk pail – well, they know not what they do. Now that young Americans once again are being twisted through the meat grinder, Trussoni’s book proves that the blood coughed up in war isn’t a healthy red, white, blue, green or yellow – just black.
Some events of note this week: on Monday, April 3 at 7:30 p.m., Pages hosts author Anosh Irani (The Cripple and his Talismans), returning to Calgary after his visit for 2004’s WordFest, with his new novel The Song of Kahunsha.
At McNally Robinson, on Thursday, March 30 at 7 p.m., the second Poetry Slam will see 10 local poets compete for some cash and a chance to compete at this year’s Spoken Word Festival, starting April 25.
If you were a fan of the first two Russel Quant mysteries (Amuse Bouche and Flight of Aquavit), hear author Anthony Bidulka read from the third in the series, Tapas on the Ramblas, at McNally on Friday, March 31 at 8 p.m.
The second annual group reading by the University of Calgary’s creative writing faculty is on Friday, March 31 at 7 p.m., in the Cassio room at MacEwan Hall. The evening will include readings from Christian Bok, Nicole Markotic, Clem Martini, Suzette Mayr, Aritha van Herk and Tom Wayman. |
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