A somewhat rough but insightful look at how people endure.
These eight short stories explore issues of sex, guilt, family expectations and more in modern India.
Gautam (Andy Leelu, 2012) shows his characters getting caught up in various kinds of traps—involving class and education differences, sex, guilt and societal expectations—and he details how they respond, which is usually with stoic acceptance. In the title story, for example, Mohammed at first loathes Mary because she treats him as less than equal, though both are servants. When their employers, the Negis, go on vacation, Mohammed is instructed to assist Mary in their absence. He correctly suspects her of being Mr. Negi’s mistress and feels unsettled by her sexuality. She gives him old clothes belonging to Mr. Negi; when Mrs. Negi remarks that Mohammed looks “dashing” upon her return, Mr. Negi is displeased—and Mrs. Negi is even more so when she discovers Mary’s affair with her husband. Both employees are fired. Somehow, they put aside their differences: “Mary brought Mohammed lunch one day and never stopped.” Elsewhere, in “Easy Savitri,” the titular womanturns to prostitution to survive after her abusive husband’s early death. The narrator, a young man with good looks and intelligence, takes advantage of her daughter Pankhuri’s adoration of him; to disguise the pregnancy, Savitri marries her daughter off to a widower. The narrator knows he’s done wrong, yet Savitri blesses him as he’s leaving: “It was by far the most difficult moment of my life. But Savitri was easy. Easy as ever.” Sometimes, Gautam’s usage and phrasing can be peculiar, clumsy or opaque: “A few kicks here and there are acceptable…so far the devil provides the essentials to remain on its side”; “Cohabitation of two immiscible feelings in a pristine heart can put the life on a cliff-hanger”; “Mohammed felt sized.” However, Gautam can achieve some evocative images, as when Savitri imagines the future as yards of plain uncut cloth, the present as a sewing machine, and the past like “wash and wear [that] has the smell of everything familiar.”
A somewhat rough but insightful look at how people endure.Pub Date: April 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-1482821697
Page Count: 142
Publisher: PartridgeIndia
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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