Word: hatchet
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Once in country, O'Brien succeeds as well as any writer in conveying the free-fall sensation of fear and the surrealism of combat. Sometimes he succumbs to stagy symbolism, such as a scene of a literal burying of a hatchet. But when one character defines death as "like being inside a book that nobody's reading," O'Brien's notion of story-truth goes off like a successful trip-flare, and we suddenly see why he had to become a writer...