A light-footed exploration of the mysteries of our existence, with the consistent theme that paradise is here on Earth.
Sixty-four mystical fables purportedly told to the author by powerful, entrancing women he's encountered in a far-ranging life.
A securities attorney in Palo Alto, California, a mathematician in Amsterdam, a novelist in London, a hitchhiker, a carpenter, and a longtime resident of the city of Salamanca are among the storytellers credited with the short tales recounted by Nightingale (Granada: Pomegranate in the Hand of God, 2015, etc.) in his new collection. Each one sheds some light on the nature of life, love, death, sex, time, and other stuff like that. For example, a Bible scholar he meets at a theology conference in New Orleans (where he is able to observe that, as a group, theologians “have an abiding affection for gumbo and rum drinks”) offers a retelling of the story of the Garden of Eden that erases original sin and makes Eve a hero. After spending the day with a Moroccan woman in her kitchen in Fez, the author learns that “Honey in the cupboard is still sweet" and “What you pay for with money, you buy with your life.” A woman who works at the Elliot Bay bookstore in Seattle reveals that “the life we choose [is] more disconcerting and extraordinary than many would wish: for it turns out that whatever we do, day by day and in every minute too, by our every thought and every action, whether we want to or not, we are telling each other the truth.” If these insights draw you in, make you think, or give you spiritual goosebumps, this book will be an ice cream store with 64 flavors. Many of the stories tell of women with extraordinary powers, such as “Beautiful Doctor of Faith Meets the Janitor,” heard in an ICU in Dallas, Texas.
A light-footed exploration of the mysteries of our existence, with the consistent theme that paradise is here on Earth.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016
ISBN: 9781619027923
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
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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