![]() ![]() In attempting to inhabit the universal soldier Turner sometimes becomes overwhelmed by his role in the enormity of the collective slaughter: asked during a writer's prison visit "how many did you kill?" he whispers "1.2 million". Written in episodic fragments that take in not only his own wars (Bosnia, Iraq) but those of his father, uncles, grandfathers and great grandfathers (Vietnam, Iwo Jima, Gettysburg), My Life as a Foreign Country is a kind of dream diary of American intervention and conflict, a fevered confessional, rooted in one voice, stretching over generations. Turner leaves his war behind in his sentences and paragraphs, he gets it out in the open, and trusts it might stay there. ![]() N ear the end of his book, Brian Turner, formerly sergeant Brian Turner of the US infantry in Iraq, now Brian Turner, Lannan literary fellow and TS Eliot prize nominee, asks a question: "How does anyone leave a war behind them, no matter what war it is, and somehow walk into the rest of his life?" That question is given many partial answers in these unnumbered pages – from the escapism of sex and drugs to the oblivion of suicide – but the book itself is the best of them. ![]()
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May 2023
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