Two lively if oddly focused stories about real people caught up in twin forms of violence.
Eighty-six-year-old Neider, a much-acclaimed Mark Twain scholar and Antarctica explorer (The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones, 1956, filmed as One-Eyed Jacks), presents two short novels, apparently his first published fiction since the ill-advised A Visit to Yazoo (1956).
In the title story, George Barber, an American nature photographer, flies to McMurdo Sound in Antarctica, the site of Mount Erebus with its fiery lake of molten lava, then boards an icebreaker, The Penguin, captained by Jack Torneau, who unaccountably takes a dislike to his passenger. Humiliatingly, the photographer is quartered not with fellow observers but in a far-off, dark, cramped rack with only a red light to see by. It’s a poor place to experience the gloriously described Southern Ocean, which has the world’s worst, most turbulent waters. Is the rather girlish captain, who has a weak stomach, fearful that Barber’s photos will expose his femininity? At the Grotto Berg itself, a spectacular thing with Roman arches so big the ship can actually sail into them, Barber gets his photos but disaster befalls the ship. In the companion novella, The Left Eye Cries First, Sid Little, 63, an early-retired Long Island attorney, has his second bar mitzvah and—at the urging of a friend’s lingering but fatal illness, and also of a dream of his homeland—decides that Gorbachev being in power is a sign that he should return to Ukraine. Sid hasn’t been there since his family fled the country when he was 11. His trip brings back rich memories of his Russian-Jewish childhood and early sexual experiences, there and in Paris. When he comes home to his still-alive but dying friend, his own health reassures him.
Two lively if oddly focused stories about real people caught up in twin forms of violence.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8154-1123-5
Page Count: 200
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2001
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
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in...
Huzzah! Martin (The Ice Dragon, 2014, etc.) delivers just what fans have been waiting for: stirring tales of the founding of the Targaryen line.
Duncan—Dunk for short—has his hapless moments. He’s big, nearly gigantic, “hugely tall for his age, a shambling, shaggy, big-boned boy of sixteen or seventeen.” Uncertain of himself, clumsy, and alone in the world, he has every one of the makings of a hero, if only events will turn in that direction. They do, courtesy of a tiny boy who steals into the “hedge knight” Dunk’s life and eventually reveals a name to match that of Ser Duncan the Tall—an altogether better name, at that, than Duncan of Flea Bottom would have been. Egg, as the squire calls himself, has a strange light about him, as if he will be destined to go on to better things, as indeed he will. Reminiscent of a simpler Arthur Rackham, the illustrations capture that light, as they do the growing friendship between Dunk and Egg—think Manute Bol and Muggsy Bogues, if your knowledge of basketball matches your interest in fantasy. This being Martin, that friendship will not be without its fraught moments, its dangers and double crosses and knightly politics. There are plenty of goopily violent episodes as well, from jousts (“this time Lord Leo Tyrell aimed his point so expertly he ripped the Grey Lion’s helm cleanly off his head”) to medieval torture (“Egg…used the hat to fan away the flies. There were hundreds crawling on the dead men, and more drifting lazily through the still, hot air.”). Throughout, Martin delivers thoughtful foreshadowing of the themes and lineages that will populate his Ice and Fire series, in which Egg, it turns out, is much less fragile than he seems.
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in addition, they succeed in making fans want more—and with luck, Martin will oblige them with more of these early yarns.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53348-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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