More information about Fatal Light
The Santa Fe Writers Project is honored to announce the acquisition of the 20th Anniversary Edition of Fatal Light, by two-time NEA fellow and Hemingway Award finalist Richard Currey, author of Lost Highway, Wars of Heaven and Crossing Over.
Fatal Light has appeared in seven languages and has been universally hailed as a tour de force. SFWP now holds international rights and will be releasing the 20th Anniversary Edition worldwide.
Currey’s extraordinary novel is a devastating portrait of war in all its horror, brutality and mindlessness, told in a beautifully cadenced prose rising at times to pure poetry. Inspired by Currey’s own experiences, it is the story of a combat medic in Vietnam and the chaos of war, set against tranquil scenes of family life back home, a kind of Grant Wood tableau of small-town America. It is a young man’s rite of passage through scenes of jungle combat to fever visions of malaria and the purgatory of life in military-occupied Saigon. Wounded and evacuated from the front lines, the medic returns from the war to stay with his grandfather, whom he learns to love for the first time. He confronts his own shattered personal history and the mysterious human capacity for renewal.
Fatal Light has appeared in seven languages and has been universally hailed as a tour de force. SFWP now holds international rights and will be releasing the 20th Anniversary Edition worldwide.
Currey’s extraordinary novel is a devastating portrait of war in all its horror, brutality and mindlessness, told in a beautifully cadenced prose rising at times to pure poetry. Inspired by Currey’s own experiences, it is the story of a combat medic in Vietnam and the chaos of war, set against tranquil scenes of family life back home, a kind of Grant Wood tableau of small-town America. It is a young man’s rite of passage through scenes of jungle combat to fever visions of malaria and the purgatory of life in military-occupied Saigon. Wounded and evacuated from the front lines, the medic returns from the war to stay with his grandfather, whom he learns to love for the first time. He confronts his own shattered personal history and the mysterious human capacity for renewal.
Fatal Light is a powerful, eloquent novel, meticulously crafted, clearly one of the very best works of fiction to emerge from the Vietnam War
-Tim O’Brien
-Tim O’Brien
Currey's novel is a powerfully written, haunting account of a young man's voyage to adulthood, confusion and alienation, beginning in America, taking us through his experiences in Vietnam and his return home. Apart from its honed lyricism, what makes this Vietnam novel superior to most others is that it is unself-conscious, allowing us to share the combat experience of Vietnam through a brilliantly chosen series of vignettes. The book shares a kinship with Michael Herr's Dispatches and, moreover, is fiercely focused and crafted with great skill. Curry has condensed his four years' experience as a combat medic into a slim but potent literary slide show. On his return to the States, as if to subtly emphasize this point, the narrator shows his Vietnam photos to his grandfather. "You plan to show these pictures . . . to anyone else? . . .Don't do it. Put these in a shoebox somewhere. . . . They're too damn hard." The narrator, alienated from the central experience of his life, is also alienated from himself. In a symbol, not only of Vietnam, but of life after that wasteful conflict, the narrator dreams of an endless walk through the cathedral light of the jungle. Men drop away, but the rest continue walking, "unable to continue and afraid to stop." This is a stunning narrative.
--Publishers Weekly
--Publishers Weekly
Release date: 2008