A few bright spots emerge among the overwritten lines; would benefit from edits.
A mixed collection of self-published poems and fiction fragments.
Cassan’s book is an uneven mix: Many poems address grand moral themes, such as concerns about the Iraq War and poverty in the United States, while others, such as “Fictions” dwell on personal encounters, figments of imagination or dreams. The scattered fragments and poems never seem to connect. Indeed, fragmentation may be the book’s overarching metaphor–greater clarity within and among each poem would give them more power. Many, such as “Babylon,” include striking and original images that an editor would likely have encouraged the author to expand upon. In “Fictions,” Cassan depicts the layering of electronics and human communication, a surreal tableau which could have been stronger if it were pared down. Meanwhile, other poems undermine fine sentiment with wordiness and sentimentality, and could be nixed altogether. For instance, when Cassan writes of “city minds / ashamed to confront / poverty’s world or to kindly mutter Hallelujah / to a sidewalk mendicant” one imagines him delving into a thesaurus for assistance. Instead, the author could have drawn inspiration from poets who use inventive language and rhythms, instead of polysyllabic words, to offer powerful social critiques. Cassan published two works of nonfiction and two works of poetry before this, and deserves praise for shouldering the challenge of shifting between genres. However, his poems show little reverence for rhythm or form–the very stuff that makes a line, stanza or paragraph poetic, even within a work of prose. The simplest subject comes alive when the writer engages human senses directly. In the words of William Gass, a writer must attend to each syllable, because rhythm “literally touches the reader.”
A few bright spots emerge among the overwritten lines; would benefit from edits.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-4196-8731-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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