Those who will find Gilb’s stories slight might ponder this: So what are Cézanne’s apples except daubs that float over the...
Ten spare stories about Mexican Americans in El Paso and Santa Fe.
Gilb’s debut collection, The Magic of Blood (1993), won the Pen/Hemingway Award and was a Pen/Faulkner finalist. Here, his magic moments sometimes display sentences of crushed jewels: “Mrs. Hargraves’s tongue was blood red with deep blue veins on its underside.” In that story, “Hueco,” a young man passing himself off as a carpenter rents a cheap, powder-blue room from Mrs. Hargraves and finds himself sleeping in the mattress depression (hueco) where both Mrs. Hargraves’s mother and grandmother died and where he now makes love to Yvette, whom Mrs. Hargraves calls “that horror” when writing him a snappish letter. In “Maria de Covina,” an 18-year-old department store clerk who’s a flashy dresser and pretends to be 21 finds himself dazed by the breasts and perfumes of his fellow clerks while striving to be faithful to his 16-year-old lover; but then the bright surfaces of the store lure him into making easy thefts that undo him. Perhaps the most spellbinding tale is “Mayela One Day in 1989,” which drifts off into stunningly surcharged nightside surrealism in darkest El Paso (“Dark, so dark that the stars glare like streetlights, and the moon hovers as in wilderness. Through this sludge of night we cross dead, metal ribs of train tracks . . .”). The longest and most amusing piece, “Bottoms,” tells of a hetero young Mexican book reviewer at a public swimming pool as he struggles to read a homosexual novel despite multilayered distractions, lost trains of thought, and deep confusion: “It all reads the same, and anywhere I read it’s as though I’d read it before and not at all.”
Those who will find Gilb’s stories slight might ponder this: So what are Cézanne’s apples except daubs that float over the canvas? But marvelous, marvelous daubs.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8021-1679-5
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2000
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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