by Courtney Angela Brkic ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2003
Generally strong debut. Here’s hoping Brkic goes on to explore other and different material.
Sixteen stories from a woman who combines her Croatian heritage and her training in forensic archaeology in traveling back to a motherland grated by war.
“In the morgue and on-site, I found letters and prayers in shirt pockets or rolled up with amulets inside tiny leather pouches that the dead had worn around their necks,” Brkic tells us of her own experiences, in 1996, as a researcher and translator in Croatia, and a forensic archeologist in Bosnia after the war. Fiction almost always suffers when the goal is to create a core of tales around a specific event, political or military, but Brkic often maintains a nice distance, even if she sometimes seems to beat her subject to death. A woman in “In the Jasmine Shade” tries to hide a pregnancy from her husband just as they are separated at the onset of the holocaust, creating questions as to whose baby it really is and whether something as frail as trust can survive the trauma. “Surveillance” is an odd love story of a man watching a woman who may be involved with dissidents abroad—but will he ever get closer to her than the lens of his camera? Javier, an Argentine forensic anthropologist fresh from Rwanda, is surprised by Bosnia in “Adiyo, Kerido,” and by the local women anxious for news of the contents of mass graves. “We Will Sleep in One Nest” looks at war from the point of view of paintings that get left behind when families are forced to evacuate on a moment’s notice. And “I heard the drumbeats of all those buried people, of a city living underground,” says the meditative narrator of “Stillness,” who goes on to discover a form of pause and poise amid the crumbled lives that litter the landscapes of slaughter.
Generally strong debut. Here’s hoping Brkic goes on to explore other and different material.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-374-26999-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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by Tim O’Brien ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 28, 1990
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
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SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
by Rattawut Lapcharoensap ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2005
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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