Kevin Powers (1) (1980–)

Yellow Birds è uno di quei romanzi che, nonostante abbia meno di duecento pagine, ho impiegato molto a leggere, e non perché fosse noioso o simili. Yellow Birds è uno di quei romanzi che devastano l'anima e c'è bisogno di una pausa tra una lettura e l'altra.

La disgraziata storia di Bartle e Murph è inscritta nella disgraziata guerra in Iraq, che l'autore ha vissuto in prima persona e ha deciso di raccontarla tramite questo romanzo straziante di perdita. Bartle, infatti, insieme al suo amico e alla sua innocenza, perde i suoi ideali e qualunque cosa lo avesse definito prima di quella maledetta guerra.

Dire cos'è successo non basta. È successo tutto. È caduto tutto.

Io non credo di aver mai compreso cosa sia il DPTS che affligge i militari di ritorno da conflitti particolarmente violenti. Non credo di saperlo nemmeno adesso, non sul serio almeno, ma quelle due pagine nelle quali Bartle immagina di parlare ai suoi amici di quel grumo contratto che ha dentro sono state illuminanti (e dolorosissime da leggere, figuriamoci a viverle).

Non mi andava di sorridere e dire grazie. Non volevo fingere di aver fatto qualcosa più che sopravvivere.

Non è facile trovare un romanzo che racconti di guerra senza scadere nella retorica: la prosa di Powers, però, nella sua scarna essenzialità, è ricca di immagini, impressioni, colori, odori, emozioni.

Ma quando lei mi disse: «Oh, John, sei tornato a casa,» non le credetti.… (mer)

What is Kevin Powers? The reader is entitled to ask after reading his new novel A Line in the Sand. An Iraq war veteran, Powers came roaring out of the blocks in 2012 with his Hemingway-inspired war novel The Yellow Birds, a piece of genuinely literary fiction. While it may have reached further than it grasped (I cringe to read back my excitable review of it from 2013, which opined that parts of it "are as good as anything Hemingway ever wrote"), the book nevertheless deserved its acclaim. Powers followed it up with a capable but unmemorable collection of poems in 2014 and, in 2018, the novel A Shout in the Ruins, an overwrought Faulkner-lite literary meditation on violence set during the American Civil War: an ambitious, though sincere, artistic failure.

Powers' new effort, A Line in the Sand, reads better than A Shout in the Ruins, but it is, in its way, even more disconcerting. For how could it not read better? It's just a straight-up, by-the numbers thriller. A Shout in the Ruins was at least trying to carve something out of a literary terrain, and The Yellow Birds succeeded in doing so, but A Line in the Sand is just content, interchangeable with just about any thriller title or author you can find on those tragically banal shelves at your local bookshop or supermarket. There are infrequent reminders that Powers was once a real writer – the framing of a sentence here and there, or a moment such as Lieutenant Billings looking down on a corpse at the end of Chapter 18 – and a worthy central theme which seeks to shine light on private military contractors, but A Line in the Sand is firmly and uncourageously camped in generic thriller territory. How characters are introduced, backstory delivered, plots structured and story resolved, all come from the tried-and-tested Patterson/Baldacci/Grisham/Coben playbook.

As a thriller, it's fine. The pages turn easily, the deaths and the twists wring a little bit of emotion from the reader, and while you know where the book's going right from the start, Powers' theme and opinions are seeded capably into the plot. Said plot does require the idiot ball to not only be dropped by certain characters, but to bounce as well, but that's fine: I've never once found a thriller that's as sophisticated as its adherents claim. The format just can't take the weight. (Naming the main character Catherine Wheel is less fathomable, however.) One could rant for quite some while against some of the strange and implausible directions Powers takes his story – does it want to be a morality tale, an action thriller, or an extra-judicial fantasy? - but for a thriller, such things are forgivable as long as the pages keep turning and you spend a few hours of your life agreeably and frivolously. (They do, and you do.)

Rather, what's disappointing about the story is thrown into stark relief at its end. You see, at the end of the book, Powers and his publisher provide an excerpt from The Yellow Birds, and while the excerpt is only a few pages, the difference in vision, ambition and quality of writing is stark. One hopes that Powers may once again show himself to be a writer who stands apart, as opposed to being lost in the crowd, but on current evidence he looks to be yet another writer of potential swallowed up by the safe and complacent currents of mainstream commercial publishing, and left to drift downstream as a directionless piece of flotsam. Hemingway would never have allowed it; he'd have gone to Africa or to a war instead. A Shout in the Ruins suggested in 2018 that, worryingly, The Yellow Birds might have been a one-off. A Line in the Sand suggests that if Kevin Powers is now just pivoting to being a thriller writer, it might be time for him and I to part ways.… (mer)

An excellent, but harrowing story of a soldier's experiences in Iraq and how he deals with the aftermath. Powers jumps back and forth between time in country, training and after at home to setup the trauma that the characters go thru and the PTSD that the narrator experiences. Excellent read.

What happened? What fucking happened? That's not even the question, I thought. How is that the question? How do you answer the unanswerable? To say what happened, the mere facts, the disposition of events in time, would come to seem like a kind of treachery. The dominoes of moments, lined up symmetrically, then tumbling backward against the hazy and unsure push of cause, showed only that a fall is every object's destiny. It is not enough to say what happened. Everything happened. Everything fell… (mer)