Barrett has given us moments that resonate true to a culture, a population and a geography that are fertile with the stuff...
A story collection in which the nights of small-town Ireland are filled with the ramblings of restless youth.
Glanbeigh is a fictional town in County Mayo, and the teens and 20-somethings are out in droves to take back the night. The pub is the center of their world. In “The Clancy Kid,” Jimmy and his mate Tug drink off a hangover and flip the car of an ex’s new fiance: “I am young, and the young do not number many here, but it is fair to say we have the run of the place.” And so Jimmy sets the hopeless tone, yet there are moments of delight as Tug, a hulk of a boy-man who gets violent when off his meds, plays with a child who guards the bridge to Farrow Hill, playing at being ''king.'' In “Bait,” a night of pool hustling turns into sudden violence in a turn-the-tables sexual confrontation. In ''Stand Your Skin,'' Bat is a damaged man, kicked in the head in a pub in a moment of senseless violence between a bunch of college kids and locals. The kicker, “who couldn’t stand being in his own skin,” commits suicide while Bat has to remain in pain, living in the surgically corrected skin of his own face. This is a powerful dark shadow of a tale, the heart of this collection of six stories and one longer novella. Barrett knows the woods and roads surrounding Glanbeigh as well as he understands the youth who roam them. This is his territory, his people. He writes with beauty and a toughness that captures the essence of boredom and angst.
Barrett has given us moments that resonate true to a culture, a population and a geography that are fertile with the stuff of good fiction.Pub Date: March 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2332-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Black Cat/Grove
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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