A follow-up collection (after 1994’s Vol. I) of deliciously eerie, enigmatic, and resonant symbolic fictions by the recently deceased Italian author (The Iguana, 1984). Ortese’s stories, written over more than a half-century of courageously sustained creative effort, are deftly declarative explorations of their author’s own inquiring sensibility, packed with autobiographical details and observations and explicitly discursive reportage. In them, the author frequently presents herself as the writer dreaming imaginative responses to crises (personal and global alike) that threaten the familial and aesthetic values she cherishes. —Folletto in Genoa,— for example, presents a family transfigured by madness as a grotesque metaphor for —the unification of Italy.— In “Redskin,” an introspective girl contrives a fabulistic escape from the looming certainty of war and a beloved brother’s death in battle. “Fantasies” is an involuted tale that reveals, in effect, how it was conceived and written; and in “Nebel (A Lost Story),” Ortese confides to us, in medias res, her uncertainty about how to develop her story. Her insistent lushness and lyricism (beautifully served by Martin’s graceful translation) is memorably displayed in a sharply detailed “tour” of Rome’s Via Floria (“The Great A Street”), and particularly in a celebratory portrayal of the rich variety of a writer’s imagination (“The Villa”). And in the most Kafkaesque story here, “Slanting Eyes,” a young girl’s —worship— of her remote father is expanded into a darkly comic mock-biblical fantasy. Ortese is often disarmingly funny (“on the subject of mountains, I have to say that here there were no mountains”), and there’s something very attractive in her open espousal of the pleasure and healing power inherent in literary artifice (a concluding autobiographical essay, “Where Time is Another,” ruminates engagingly on her passion for “self-expression” among a family largely indifferent to it, and as a citizen of a country that has suppressed it). Enchanting stuff, from a unique writer. If you like Borges, you’ll like Ortese.
Pub Date: May 29, 1998
ISBN: 0-929701-56-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1998
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
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in...
Huzzah! Martin (The Ice Dragon, 2014, etc.) delivers just what fans have been waiting for: stirring tales of the founding of the Targaryen line.
Duncan—Dunk for short—has his hapless moments. He’s big, nearly gigantic, “hugely tall for his age, a shambling, shaggy, big-boned boy of sixteen or seventeen.” Uncertain of himself, clumsy, and alone in the world, he has every one of the makings of a hero, if only events will turn in that direction. They do, courtesy of a tiny boy who steals into the “hedge knight” Dunk’s life and eventually reveals a name to match that of Ser Duncan the Tall—an altogether better name, at that, than Duncan of Flea Bottom would have been. Egg, as the squire calls himself, has a strange light about him, as if he will be destined to go on to better things, as indeed he will. Reminiscent of a simpler Arthur Rackham, the illustrations capture that light, as they do the growing friendship between Dunk and Egg—think Manute Bol and Muggsy Bogues, if your knowledge of basketball matches your interest in fantasy. This being Martin, that friendship will not be without its fraught moments, its dangers and double crosses and knightly politics. There are plenty of goopily violent episodes as well, from jousts (“this time Lord Leo Tyrell aimed his point so expertly he ripped the Grey Lion’s helm cleanly off his head”) to medieval torture (“Egg…used the hat to fan away the flies. There were hundreds crawling on the dead men, and more drifting lazily through the still, hot air.”). Throughout, Martin delivers thoughtful foreshadowing of the themes and lineages that will populate his Ice and Fire series, in which Egg, it turns out, is much less fragile than he seems.
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in addition, they succeed in making fans want more—and with luck, Martin will oblige them with more of these early yarns.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53348-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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