A singular, if uneven, collection of tales with flashes of brilliance.
A debut volume of short stories explores Canadian Jewish identity.
Seven stories are offered here, united by the themes of religion, love, and outsiders. The collection opens with “Restaurants,” an intriguing tale about Sarah, a Jewish waitress who embarks on an affair with Samir, a Palestinian co-worker. Kreuter cleverly considers the fling from the perspectives of both lovers and David, Sarah’s boyfriend. This is followed by “Amsterdam,” which tells of three young Canadian Jewish men who take a detour from their visit to Israel to have a blowout in Amsterdam before heading home. They smoke weed and visit the red-light district—a generic tale but for the fact they are tormented by the memory of Anne Frank. Other stories include the offbeat “Searching for Crude,” about a wealthy CEO who is mesmerized by a guitarist named Crude and becomes obsessed with matching his musicianship, and “Ninety-Nine,” about two close friends who are riven apart when one chooses to become “a traditional Jewish woman.” The volume ends with a longer, yet somewhat nondescript, tale about a group of girls following a band across America. The collection shows signs of a burgeoning talent but lacks consistency. In the opening of the book, Kreuter’s writing is a potent cocktail of racial tension and carnal desire: “That first time he came inside her and his whole body emptied out, his history and sorrows and worries purged for what felt like the first time.” By the close, his prose is noticeably diluted. “Chasing the Tonic” offers a watery contemporary regurgitation of 1960s hippiedom: “What did he believe in? The open road, music, the night sky, that, as he put it more than once, ‘Music and dancing and the redistribution of wealth can change the world.’ ” Kreuter’s narratives always deliver strong, concise messages. For example “Searching for Crude” attacks the rapacious nature of capitalist endeavors. But as a new writer, he tends to unnecessarily telegraph this lesson: “He didn’t want to be Crude. He wanted to consume him, to take his unrefined magic and keep it locked in a safe.” The author should trust his readership and the strength of his storylines rather than feel the need to hammer his points home. Still, Kreuter’s writing at its best has an addictive intensity that will leave most readers wanting more.
A singular, if uneven, collection of tales with flashes of brilliance.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-988040-41-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Tightrope Books, Inc.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
SEEN & HEARD
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in...
Huzzah! Martin (The Ice Dragon, 2014, etc.) delivers just what fans have been waiting for: stirring tales of the founding of the Targaryen line.
Duncan—Dunk for short—has his hapless moments. He’s big, nearly gigantic, “hugely tall for his age, a shambling, shaggy, big-boned boy of sixteen or seventeen.” Uncertain of himself, clumsy, and alone in the world, he has every one of the makings of a hero, if only events will turn in that direction. They do, courtesy of a tiny boy who steals into the “hedge knight” Dunk’s life and eventually reveals a name to match that of Ser Duncan the Tall—an altogether better name, at that, than Duncan of Flea Bottom would have been. Egg, as the squire calls himself, has a strange light about him, as if he will be destined to go on to better things, as indeed he will. Reminiscent of a simpler Arthur Rackham, the illustrations capture that light, as they do the growing friendship between Dunk and Egg—think Manute Bol and Muggsy Bogues, if your knowledge of basketball matches your interest in fantasy. This being Martin, that friendship will not be without its fraught moments, its dangers and double crosses and knightly politics. There are plenty of goopily violent episodes as well, from jousts (“this time Lord Leo Tyrell aimed his point so expertly he ripped the Grey Lion’s helm cleanly off his head”) to medieval torture (“Egg…used the hat to fan away the flies. There were hundreds crawling on the dead men, and more drifting lazily through the still, hot air.”). Throughout, Martin delivers thoughtful foreshadowing of the themes and lineages that will populate his Ice and Fire series, in which Egg, it turns out, is much less fragile than he seems.
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in addition, they succeed in making fans want more—and with luck, Martin will oblige them with more of these early yarns.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53348-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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