Solidly constructed work that doesn’t immediately wow.
Ohlin follows up her debut novel (The Missing Person, 2005) with a low-key collection that dabbles gingerly in suburban angst.
The 17 stories here are mostly too brief for satisfying developments, a problem exacerbated by the author’s habit of employing quick turns at the end for mild surprise. “Simple Exercises for the Beginning Student” exemplifies Ohlin’s understated tone in its portrait of Kevin, a friendless, seemingly dull-witted eight-year-old boy who decides he wants to take piano lessons, even though his parents are struggling to pay the rent and don’t have a piano. Moreover, his mother is pregnant with a child her husband apparently doesn’t want, and the tentative lessons assume a redeeming, albeit fleeting beauty in the face of the father’s abandonment of his family. “A Theory of Entropy” moves along in a similarly uninflected manner. It takes place at an isolated lake cottage inhabited by freelance designer Claire and her hermit boyfriend Carson, an academic hammering out a book based on his highly abstract notions about entropy—which Claire imagines is a “scientific term for fate.” When his young, female editor, Jocelyn, arrives to spend several days working with Carson on the manuscript, Claire finds Jocelyn wonderfully human in a way that her boyfriend is not. The title story imagines a love affair between two emotionally damaged people: Robert, a lonely financial analyst, and Astrid, the strangely unhinged woman he meets at a wedding in Babylon, Long Island. In spite of the alarming tissue of pathological lies he catches her in, Robert stands by his rare love for Astrid: “Without her there was nothing. Yet he had no idea who she was.” One of the few stories that do bear an organic growth is “The Tennis Partner,” a rueful coming-of-ager told by a now-adult narrator who remembers how he loved from afar and lost the beautiful daughter of his father’s tennis partner.
Solidly constructed work that doesn’t immediately wow.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-375-41525-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
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
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
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