Best at its most brutal, the shocking imagery saves this often overwritten collection from succumbing to immigrant clichés...
Sundaresan (The Splendor of Silence, 2007, etc.) returns to short stories to chronicle the often extreme changes in contemporary Indian society.
For the most part, the author narrates her stories from the perspective of modernized or Westernized Indians trying to come to terms with the rural traditions they have left behind. In “Shelter of Rain,” a young woman who had been adopted out of an Indian orphanage and raised by white parents in Seattle receives a letter from her biological aunt and remembers some of the conditions of her early childhood. Others are more brutal—the narrator of “Fire” returns from America to her native India to confront her grandmother after learning about her younger sister Kamala’s death. The grandmother had led a group stoning against Kamala and her Muslim boyfriend because she feared the shame that their marriage would bring on the family. Similarly, in “The Faithful Wife,” a young reporter leaves the city when his grandmother tells him that their village is planning to burn a 12-year-old widow alive on her husband’s funeral pyre, in order to honor a centuries-old tradition. Other characters have a difficult time accepting the loss of tradition. Nathan, a new grandfather in “The Most Unwanted,” must come to terms with his illegitimate grandson, now living in his house. The grandfather resents the boy for what he perceives to be his daughter’s mistakes. And Meha, in “Three and a Half Seconds,” narrates a tragic story of moving her family to Mumbai from their rural rice farm, where her son becomes corrupted by the modern lifestyle and turns into a shallow monster.
Best at its most brutal, the shocking imagery saves this often overwritten collection from succumbing to immigrant clichés so common in contemporary South Asian fiction.Pub Date: Dec. 16, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-8609-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2008
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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