Challenging, contemporary short stories with sharp feminist commentary, translated from Georgian.
Kordzaia possesses such dexterity with tone and structure that the book’s 22 tales feel like raunchy, visceral oral history cloaked in an array of fictional forms. The collection begins with the long, somewhat confusing title story about generations of women looking back at personal and national history, giving birth, grieving husbands who’ve disappeared during wartime, by turns angry or in awe of fate. The story’s breadth frames the range of women’s voices that follow. They live in mostly urban places, usually Tblisi, in vague yet hard circumstances, surviving bad relationships, raising children with little support, often at each other’s throats just before waxing poetic about life. In “A Foreign Man,” a painting triggers memories of past love in a series of anecdotes about bygone parties and art openings with friends drinking, flirting, sleeping on balconies—a paean to the sweet taste of regret. Many stories are monologues with fine twists, equal parts comedy and pathos. The dialogue rivals Beckett (“There, In the North”) for existential hilarity, and in cooler moments, the prose is reminiscent of Jean Rhys. In “It’s Raining,” an unnamed narrator’s experience is rendered timeless as her tales of love gone wrong lead to an act of violence and a coda from a mental hospital: “I am waiting for the time when I’ll become embittered.” Dependence on men tends to lead to despair, the violence of a passionate affair akin to war, with those who’ve survived questioning their methods and self-worths. As one supposedly happy woman is asked by a depressed friend in “An Insignificant Story of a Failed Suicide,” “If I live a long and happy life, does that mean I’ll be sent straight to heaven?” Not all gems but essential reading in a sterling translation from a country little heard from in English-speaking countries.
Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-56478-875-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
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
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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