For readers who persevere, rewards lurk beneath the metafictional façade.
Argentina-born novelist Borinsky (All Night Movie, 2002, etc.) returns with a collection of arch, opaque stories, ranging from two-and-a-half pages to one line.
Presumably set in Buenos Aires, these 88 mini-morality tales caution against trusting either the opposite sex or a country’s current ruling junta. In “Love Song,” a wife who leaves her husband for a baker is forced to return as her ex’s domestic servant when, aided by global economics, the baker goes out of business. Her new husband dies of “the well-known disease . . . after treating an albino canary’s infected pimple”—and things only get more obscure from there. In the longest and most conventional story, “The Contest,” a woman wins a “Voyage of the Millennium,” but kills herself when she learns that she can’t take her beloved cats on the trip. The shorter stories are even more overtly puzzling, frequently (but not consistently) disdaining such niceties as capitalization. The narrator of “haven’t I seen that face before?” frets over her lover’s haste to return home, knowing that his wife will confront him with evidence of the affair, perhaps supplied by the mistress herself. In “a strong hand,” the contemptuous description of a man who fails to conform to consumer culture ends with the chilling observation that he’ll make an ideal torture victim. “Let’s Not Be Selfish” urges older women to dress like teenagers, and vice-versa, in order to take social pressure off both groups. Students of translation will refer frequently to the original Spanish in this dual-language edition to see what interesting liberties have been taken in the facing-page English version. Borinsky (Latin American and Comparative Literature/Boston Univ.), who collaborated on the translation, argues in her preface that a less literal rendering was necessary to preserve her irony in English.
For readers who persevere, rewards lurk beneath the metafictional façade.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2007
ISBN: 0-299-21600-4
Page Count: 196
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 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
SEEN & HEARD
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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