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Title: A Beautiful Weaving
Review: What a great gift Louise has given us. The stories and questions that arise from the souvenirs she encounters are woven as delicately and powerfully as the silk and stationary on which the stories first appear. Permission is granted to take artifacts from one's life and examine them with tenderness, obsessiveness, and curiosity. I feel so much more compassion toward soldiers. Tim O'Brien and Michael Herr surely opened me up to their powerful confusion and passion from their Vietnam War experiences in The Things They Carry and Dispatches. But this was different. This story exposes the longing a soldier has to be with his loved ones, and the harshness of how this loving man is affected for the rest of his life. The Souvenir cuts to the core of what we lose in war from one generation to the next, and what is gained from a close examination of that loss. A beautiful tear jerker and a deep analysis.
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