For all that, the reader won’t know him any better than the other rent-a-cast characters, nor will his closing blather of...
A 19th-century debut historical indefatigable in its details but curiously underdriven by character.
Young Brendan Kane, having witnessed pretty much all the Civil War carnage he can stand, deserts from the northern army, makes his way to New York, and ends up as crewman on a fortune-hunting Arctic expedition with the ship Narthex. Also on board are the voyage’s monetary backer, the shadowy West, who plays the pianola in his closed cabin; the by-the-book captain, Griffin; and Dr. Architeuthis, the hyper-knowledgeable and compulsively sample-collecting scientist who waits until a point well into the expedition before revealing its purpose: to find the volcanically warmed paradise—a kind of Arctic Eden—that he’s absolutely certain is there. Other shipmen on board aren’t so sure—the quick-witted Adney, the experienced and powerful Reinhold, not even Aziz, the sensitive fellow with an extra hand on one of his arms who stays below to man the boiler. Before the real suffering begins, Kane, befriending Aziz, learns that the kindly boy is in flight from a land where children are purposely deformed in order to be sold as freaks (his own father was one of the most grotesque of these, a “rope eater”). Hanging on only this ultrathin and exceedingly dubious symbolic thread, the novel trudges on. Winter brings severe storms, the ship is crippled, then crushed by ice, and must be abandoned (excepting Aziz, who stays to die). Extraordinary hardships and near starvation follow even as Dr. Architeuthis pushes on—and on, and on—toward his Eden. Toes and fingers will fall off, feet be amputated, men will sicken, be injured, go mad (or worse) and one by one die, until, Ishmael-like, only Brendan Kane will remain—yes, to tell the tale.
For all that, the reader won’t know him any better than the other rent-a-cast characters, nor will his closing blather of pseudo-mystical prose help. Lots of adventure, nothing in it.Pub Date: Dec. 30, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50977-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2003
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
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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