Uneven at times, but when it sparks, it catches fire.
Cuban-Americans grapple with the beauty, boundaries and nuances of their cultural heritage in this irregular, multifaceted new collection from Rodríguez Milanés (Literature and Writing/Univ. of Central Florida; Marielitos, Balseros and Other Exiles, 2009, etc.).
These characters' lives all intersect with Cuba—whether they have immigrated to it, been exiled from it, never known it, or lived and died within its shores. And, given current events, there may be no better time in recent memory for this chorus of voices to resound. Here, tradition collides with modern ideals on and off the island, and all of them implore all of the others to listen to what they have to say. In the opening story, “Niñas de Casa,” girls are undone by the men around them, and one young woman develops a ferocious resolution to do right by their memories. (The theme of men and women being haunted by machismo’s innocuous and terrifying iterations appears throughout.) An aging mother laments her grown children’s choices and longs to give homes—and second chances—to kids who have been stranded at the U.S.–Mexico border (“Poor and Unhappy”). A gay man tries to explain to his sister that his niece’s boyfriend might be gay as well (“Who Knows Best”). A teenager leaves Florida to visit her summer fling in the frozen New Jersey winter (“Big Difference”). A tough-talking girl invites her Haitian boyfriend to Thanksgiving dinner with her family, with heartbreaking results (“The Law of Progress”). The characters are in turn trapped beneath the details of their identities—Cuban, American, male, female, straight, queer, old-fashioned, forward-thinking, religious or not—and uplifted by them. The stories that don't work fall flat and seem uncertain of their own purpose. The stories that do work, however, are high-wire balancing acts, a blend of sorrow, wit and loveliness, and the kind of real that catches in a reader’s throat.
Uneven at times, but when it sparks, it catches fire.Pub Date: April 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-632460-04-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Ig Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
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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