An intense and button-pushing collection.
A clutch of early stories from the poet, playwright, and provocateur, infused with jazz and informed by racial alienation.
First published in 1967, this debut story collection by Baraka (1934-2014) displays his roots in the Beat movement: run-on sentences abound, as do observations of smoky clubs and hipster friends. (“I had a little cup full of wine a murderer friend of mine made me drink, so I drank it and tossed the cup in the air, then fell in line behind the last wild horn man.”) But it’s also evident that Baraka was eager to break out on his own and find a style and theme that reflected his particular sense of African-American life. On that front, these stories are best read as experiments in how to convey conflicting moods: by turns his style is satirical (black college students mock a professor who insists “we are white and featureless under this roof”), vengeful (in “Unfinished,” a character fantasizes about strangling a Southern governor), or philosophically resigned (“reality was something I was convinced I could not have”). Baraka’s prose, often loose and abstracted, sometimes gets over on sheer energy—“The Screamers,” set in a jazz joint, ends in a run-on crescendo of racial violence spilling out onto the streets. But he could make a story work in a more conventional and muted form, as in “Going Down Slow,” in which a man’s jealousy over his wife’s affair prompts a violent act. Alas, there are also glimpses of the casual homophobia that, along with his anti-Semitic remarks, would in time make Baraka a lightning rod and a relatively isolated literary figure. Those retrograde intonations make many stories feel dated. But the book is worth reading to see the way he feverishly tinkered with ways to explore a multiplicity of black experiences.
An intense and button-pushing collection.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61775-395-4
Page Count: 150
Publisher: Akashic
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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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