Electrifying tales of vibrant urban nights and acrid, desperate days.
Love, life, revenge, survival and compassion all figure in this bighearted, daring collection of stories from a gifted Nigerian writer.
Barrett—a prize-winning contributor to several anthologies and journals—shares as much with Raymond Carver or Amy Hempel as Chinua Achebe, from whom he draws inspiration. The author has that innate sense of what it is below the surface that sends people simmering, not to mention the impeccable sense of timing that the form demands. Many of the stories, loosely based on Barrett’s family, are mundane tragedies. In the opener, “The Worst Thing That Happened,” an old-age pensioner with numerous children struggles to find someone to pick her up from cataract surgery. “Godspeed and Perpetua" chronicles the long, slow demise of an arranged marriage and the incredible lengths a noble man must go to in order to protect his family. Others are simply stories of survival. In “The Shape of a Full Circle,” when 14-year-old Dimié loses the money for dinner, not to mention his alcoholic mother’s nightly blessing, he must draw on his grandmother’s good graces for help. It’s one of those stories that Barrett lands with a shattering blow: “When Daoju Anabraba, a smile playing on her chapped lips, uttered the words, ‘I hate your eyes, my son,’ he slapped her.” Another, “Dream Chaser,” plays off the post-modern trope of skilled young hackers cruising the Web for suckers, pretending to be girls they are not. The final story, “A Nairobi Story of Comings and Goings,” is another unromantic heartbreaker about the volatile relationship between a Nigerian man and a white NGO worker. “Love means you make me happy until you don’t,” Barrett writes, with startling finality.
Electrifying tales of vibrant urban nights and acrid, desperate days.Pub Date: May 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-55597-640-8
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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