A masterful evocation of a displaced people caught between past and present.
Like the poignant lament of a Scottish piper, this first collection by the acclaimed Canadian writer (No Great Mischief, p. 410) details the bittersweet lives of the Highlanders and their descendants who settled on Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island.
Chronologically arranged according to publication date, MacLeod’s 16 tales reflect a lifelong preoccupation with a place, a people, and a language: the Gaelic tongue that everyone once spoke. By the 1980s, the time of “Clearances,” only the old-timers speak the language, since—as the aging protagonist, the last to farm the family land, observes—the Highlanders are now, like other minorities, “trapped in the beautiful prisons of the languages they loved.” Earlier stories are also infused with memories of past sorrows and hardships as characters recall how avaricious landlords forced their ancestors out of the Scottish Highlands, and how, once they landed on the island to contend with treacherous weather and fractious seas, they cleared the land, raised livestock, and fished the waters. The volume includes the two stories that earned MacLeod inclusion in the Modern Library’s list of the 200 greatest writers in English since 1950. In “The Lost Salt Gift of Blood,” a teacher at a midwestern university returns to see the young son he fathered but never acknowledged, and reluctantly rejects the claims of both fatherhood and the timeless place where the old superstitions linger, and children still catch trout, trap lobsters, and sing Gaelic songs. And “As Birds Bring Forth the Sun” shows how the spectral sighting of a gray dog whose feral pups once killed the ancestor of a Toronto family portends further death. Other pieces depict families losing loved ones to coal-mining disasters, to storms at sea, and more insidiously to cities like Toronto as the fishing dies out, the mines close, and tourists buy up the oceanfront farms.
A masterful evocation of a displaced people caught between past and present.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-393-05035-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
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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