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
Visionary speculative stories that will change the way readers see themselves and the world around them: This book delivers...
Exploring humankind's place in the universe and the nature of humanity, many of the stories in this stellar collection focus on how technological advances can impact humanity’s evolutionary journey.
Chiang's (Stories of Your Life and Others, 2002) second collection begins with an instant classic, “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” which won Hugo and Nebula awards for Best Novelette in 2008. A time-travel fantasy set largely in ancient Baghdad, the story follows fabric merchant Fuwaad ibn Abbas after he meets an alchemist who has crafted what is essentially a time portal. After hearing life-changing stories about others who have used the portal, he decides to go back in time to try to right a terrible wrong—and realizes, too late, that nothing can erase the past. Other standout selections include “The Lifecycle of Software Objects,” a story about a software tester who, over the course of a decade, struggles to keep a sentient digital entity alive; “The Great Silence,” which brilliantly questions the theory that humankind is the only intelligent race in the universe; and “Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny,” which chronicles the consequences of machines raising human children. But arguably the most profound story is "Exhalation" (which won the 2009 Hugo Award for Best Short Story), a heart-rending message and warning from a scientist of a highly advanced, but now extinct, race of mechanical beings from another universe. Although the being theorizes that all life will die when the universes reach “equilibrium,” its parting advice will resonate with everyone: “Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so.”
Visionary speculative stories that will change the way readers see themselves and the world around them: This book delivers in a big way.Pub Date: May 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-101-94788-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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