Still, these characters’ observations and revelations ring true.
Holocaust survivors and their children battle dreams, memory and elusive truths in this debut collection.
In “The House on Kronenstrasse,” Christiane returns to Germany after her elderly mother dies, traveling from New York, where she was raised, to Heidelberg, the town where she was born to a Nazi soldier who died early in the war, and a German housekeeper, who worked for a family of wealthy Jews. She makes the trip to her mother’s deathbed, urging that she go back to the home where they lived as a family, at 58 Kronenstrasse. When Christiane arrives there, however, she finds that her own childhood memories seem to be those of another girl’s life. “The Porcelain Monkey” blends a historical footnote—in 1759, the composer Felix Mendelssohn’s grandfather, a Jew, was forced to buy 20 hideous, life-sized porcelain monkeys from the Royal Porcelain Works in order to obtain King Frederich’s permission to marry—with a contemporary Orthodox Jew’s decision to reveal to her daughter some dark secrets. In “The Lamp,” Miriam finds her mother, Ruth, has passed away, leaving behind a note asking her to protect the ugly old lamp her mother brought to America as a refugee from Germany. In a parallel storyline, Ruth narrates the provenance of the lamp—and her daughter. “Dark Urgings of the Blood” follows the increasingly fraught relationship between psychiatrist Deborah and her patient Dvorah, an Orthodox mother of seven who is institutionalized for trying to kill her infant son. The similarity of their names is just the first of many coincidences that lead Deborah to explore a darkness of her own. Nayman, a psychologist, constructs powerful emotional journeys for her characters, but does so from a clinical distance that keeps the reader once removed.
Still, these characters’ observations and revelations ring true.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-9268-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
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
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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