Simpers along with irritating, prurient superficiality.
Three bleak, repetitious tales about young Japanese women entangled in sadistic sexual relationships with American men: previously untranslated 1980s work by prize-winning Japanese novelist Yamada (Trash, 1995, etc.).
The title story involves a love affair between Kim, a young exotic dancer, and Spoon, a black Navy deserter. Nicknamed for the spoon he fingers in his pocket, he deals drugs and eventually gets hauled away by the military for trying to sell confidential documents. Part of Spoon’s attraction to Kim is his strange otherness: his huge size, musky smell, greasy soul-food diet and disgusting manners. She enjoys being a “bad girl” and mixing pleasure with pain when they have rough sex, which must mean love. Yamada’s descriptions are comically hackneyed and devoid of irony, perhaps a function of the translation (e.g., “it was far more difficult to lick his wounds than to suck his cock”; “I cried and moaned as if I were at death’s door”). The next story, “The Piano Player’s Fingers,” follows a similar, intentionally provocative path as it describes an affair between big, black jazz piano player Leroy Jones and diminutive party girl Ruiko, who’s not as vulnerable as she looks. Leroy rapturously bats her around, disappears for two years, then returns in the company of various beautiful women, to Ruiko’s obsessive jealousy. For a short while, the two resume their dangerous coupling, but it ends badly. The language is silly (“Leroy’s fingers, playing my body, had captured my heart”), the characters undeveloped and stereotypical. “Jesse” deviates from the other stories, which were related by naïve-sounding protagonists with little sense of self-worth. A third-person narration shows Coco, the new girlfriend of a divorced American, trying to win the affection and respect of Rick’s 11-year-old son, Jesse, whose mother is also Japanese. Over a period of ten days, while Rick is absent on a trip, Coco endures the boy’s emotional manipulations and makes some intelligent deductions about love.
Simpers along with irritating, prurient superficiality.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2006
ISBN: 0-312-35226-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
A raw and incandescently written foray into fiction by one of our most gifted poets.
A young man writes a letter to his illiterate mother in an attempt to make sense of his traumatic beginnings.
When Little Dog is a child growing up in Hartford, he is asked to make a family tree. Where other children draw full green branches full of relatives, Little Dog’s branches are bare, with just five names. Born in Vietnam, Little Dog now lives with his abusive—and abused—mother and his schizophrenic grandmother. The Vietnam War casts a long shadow on his life: His mother is the child of an anonymous American soldier—his grandmother survived as a sex worker during the conflict. Without siblings, without a father, Little Dog’s loneliness is exacerbated by his otherness: He is small, poor, Asian, and queer. Much of the novel recounts his first love affair as a teen, with a “redneck” from the white part of town, as he confesses to his mother how this doomed relationship is akin to his violent childhood. In telling the stories of those who exist in the margins, Little Dog says, “I never wanted to build a ‘body of work,’ but to preserve these, our bodies, breathing and unaccounted for, inside the work.” Vuong has written one of the most lauded poetry debuts in recent memory (Night Sky with Exit Wounds, 2016), and his first foray into fiction is poetic in the deepest sense—not merely on the level of language, but in its structure and its intelligence, moving associationally from memory to memory, quoting Barthes, then rapper 50 Cent. The result is an uncategorizable hybrid of what reads like memoir, bildungsroman, and book-length poem. More important than labels, though, is the novel’s earnest and open-hearted belief in the necessity of stories and language for our survival.
A raw and incandescently written foray into fiction by one of our most gifted poets.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-56202-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
Another artistic triumph, and surefire bestseller, for this fearless writer.
This Afghan-American author follows his debut (The Kite Runner, 2003) with a fine risk-taking novel about two victimized but courageous Afghan women.
Mariam is a bastard. Her mother was a housekeeper for a rich businessman in Herat, Afghanistan, until he impregnated and banished her. Mariam’s childhood ended abruptly when her mother hanged herself. Her father then married off the 15-year-old to Rasheed, a 40ish shoemaker in Kabul, hundreds of miles away. Rasheed is a deeply conventional man who insists that Mariam wear a burqa, though many women are going uncovered (it’s 1974). Mariam lives in fear of him, especially after numerous miscarriages. In 1987, the story switches to a neighbor, nine-year-old Laila, her playmate Tariq and her parents. It’s the eighth year of Soviet occupation—bad for the nation, but good for women, who are granted unprecedented freedoms. Kabul’s true suffering begins in 1992. The Soviets have gone, and rival warlords are tearing the city apart. Before he leaves for Pakistan, Tariq and Laila make love; soon after, her parents are killed by a rocket. The two storylines merge when Rasheed and Mariam shelter the solitary Laila. Rasheed has his own agenda; the 14-year-old will become his second wife, over Mariam’s objections, and give him an heir, but to his disgust Laila has a daughter, Aziza; in time, he’ll realize Tariq is the father. The heart of the novel is the gradual bonding between the girl-mother and the much older woman. Rasheed grows increasingly hostile, even frenzied, after an escape by the women is foiled. Relief comes when Laila gives birth to a boy, but it’s short-lived. The Taliban are in control; women must stay home; Rasheed loses his business; they have no food; Aziza is sent to an orphanage. The dramatic final section includes a murder and an execution. Despite all the pain and heartbreak, the novel is never depressing; Hosseini barrels through each grim development unflinchingly, seeking illumination.
Another artistic triumph, and surefire bestseller, for this fearless writer.Pub Date: May 22, 2007
ISBN: 1-59448-950-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2007
BOOK TO SCREEN
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