Even when these stories are funny and hopeful, an inescapable history is always waiting.
Posthumous debut from an author whose short fictions appeared in the New Yorker and n+1.
In “Maly, Maly, Maly,” Ves and his cousin Maly escape to get high and watch porn while their family prepares for a party where monks will declare that another cousin’s baby is the reincarnation of Maly’s mother, Somaly. In “Somaly Serey, Serey Somaly,” that baby, Serey, has grown into a nurse who is caring for the great-aunt who raised Maly after her mother died. Ma Eng is suffering from dementia, but her insistence that Serey is her dead niece Somaly fits a pattern in Serey’s life. Presented with the chance to pass her haunted legacy onto Maly’s daughter, Serey thinks twice about what she’s doing but can’t resist the possibility of being free of her family’s history. Generational trauma is an undercurrent throughout this book. The protagonists of these stories grew up in California, but they are constantly aware that their parents and grandparents and aunties and uncles witnessed genocide before escaping Cambodia. This awareness manifests in different ways across the collection. Set in the aftermath of a lavish wedding, “We Would’ve Been Princes!” follows brothers Marlon and Bond as they try to find out if a wealthy relative stiffed the bride and groom of a cash gift at the reception. The answer to this question is important because Marlon and Bond want to please their mother by delivering this bit of gossip, but it also reveals differing attitudes about what refugees owe each other—and it involves some trickery by a Cambodian singer flown in for the nuptials. In “Human Development,” Anthony, whose newish career is teaching private school kids about diversity, is at a party surrounded by insufferable tech bros when he connects with another Cambodian guy on Grindr. Anthony’s reaction to the relationship that develops is shaped, at least in part, by how much he wants his own past and the collective past he has inherited to define him.
Even when these stories are funny and hopeful, an inescapable history is always waiting.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-304990-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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