Paredes, an ethnographer, literary critic, and social historian of national repute, is virtually the founder of Chicano cultural studies as an academic discipline. He has also dabbled in fiction, and this volume represents the first time his short stories have been collected in one place. Written between 1940 and 1953, all but two of these 17 stories are being published for the first time. A lengthy critical introduction by Ram¢n Sald°var of Stanford University situates Paredes's work in a larger historical context, which is absolutely essential to understanding several of the stories that draw on the troubled history of the Chicano community in Texas and (in the case of the story ``The Gringo'') during the events of the Mexican War. The stories fall into several categories: Several, including the title offering, deal with the problems of Mexican-American children growing up in poverty near the US Army's Fort Jones; the best works in the collection are set among the US Army of occupation in Japan; others subtly puncture the myth of machismo. At his best, Paredes writes with darkly tragic irony of men trapped in self-imposed images of masculinity, whether Chicano or Anglo, and of young boys and their first encounters with death. The last two stories in the collection represent a radical departure from the tone of the rest: They are raucous picaresques centering on the machinations of a wily Chicano trickster figure, Johnny Picadero. These bring the book to a surprisingly rollicking conclusion and make one yearn for more stories about Picadero. The collection serves a useful historical purpose, documenting yet another facet of the American literary experience. As literature, the book is uneven, with several of the stories little more than anecdotes. However, the occupation stories and the Picadero tales are well worth reading.
Pub Date: July 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-55885-071-6
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Arte Público
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1994
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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