Winningly arch and unusual takes on common household predicaments.
Eleven quirky tales from the Chilean novelist (Ways of Going Home, 2013, etc.), powered by people's fear of relationships and the strange ways we project our urge for connection onto others.
Twice in this collection a character clings to a computer for warmth, an act that symbolizes the alienation the inhabitants of Zambra’s world feel and his curious take on those feelings. “Memories of a Personal Computer" tracks the history of one machine from its purchase in 2000 to its banishment years later; in between, Zambra exposes just how much the machine draws together and separates the owner's family, wryly depicting it as quasi-human (“the computer’s conduct was, during this period, exemplary"). Similarly, “Family Life” follows a man who’s taken a catsitting gig after hitting the skids; searching for the cat, he begins a flirtation with a local woman, prompting him to extend his bumbling playacting at domesticity. Zambra is particularly interested in the childhood roots of his characters' harmless but unusual behavior: In the title story, an altar boy is guilt-stricken after caressing another boy; in “Camilo,” the arrival of the godson of the narrator’s father throws off the household’s rhythms; and the school kids in “National Institute,” who are terrified of their domineering teachers, are at first so dehumanized that the narrator refers to his classmates as numbers. Though the subjects throughout are serious, Zambra has a light touch; former dictator Augusto Pinochet is referred to numerous times but more as a generational marker than as political shading. At times, Zambra’s cleverness gets the better of him, as in “I Smoked Very Well,” an offbeat quitter’s diary, but the concluding “Artist’s Rendition,” about a crime writer rushing to finish a story, artfully shows the transformation of difficult fact into resonant art.
Winningly arch and unusual takes on common household predicaments.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-940450-52-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: McSweeney’s
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
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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