Catching up on some earlier Vargas Llosa. The title novella recounts the adolescence and, later, the self-destructive young adulthood of "P.P." Cuellar, who as a boy was attacked by a Great Dane in the locker room of his Catholic boys' school and partially castrated (". . . the shits, the my Gods, the get outs, the screams, the get losts, the get goings, the brothers' desperation, their terrible fright"). Though handsome, he obviously keeps himself distant from girls, compensating by being ever wilder and daring and foolish and turned-in to himself. As a tale it's only so-so, interesting chiefly for its cascading, breathless style. The six short stories that fill up the rest of the book mostly concern a barrio—gang—of upper-class young Lima, Peru, students: fights, contests, a school rebel-lion (possibly a preliminary sketch for Vargas Llosa's first novel, The Time of the Hero). Nicely rendered into English—no easy task in "The Cubs"—this early work is open and airy, graceful but hardly compelling.
Pub Date: Aug. 29, 1979
ISBN: 0374521948
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1979
The thirty-one stories of the late Flannery O'Connor, collected for the first time. In addition to the nineteen stories gathered in her lifetime in Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965) and A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955) there are twelve previously published here and there. Flannery O'Connor's last story, "The Geranium," is a rewritten version of the first which appears here, submitted in 1947 for her master's thesis at the State University of Iowa.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1971
ISBN: 0374515360
Page Count: 555
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1971
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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