Blips (sometimes) of modern drollery, glimpsed on quickly turned pages, then gone forever.
Britisher Rhodes appears to enter the contest for smallest book of the year, offering 101 pieces said each to be 101 words long. But he doesn’t take the prize from the reigning Marty Asher, whose Boomer (p. 400) also had 101 tiny sections.
The subject is love as Rhodes’s “I” tells non-tales of ex or current lovers with names (sometimes) like Celestia, Xanthe, Zazie, Azure, Iolanthe, Running Water, Nightjar, January, Skylark, Orchid, and—well, that’s ten, and, besides, you get the idea. What actually to think of these many little pieces, though, may be better left to individual readers. Some are quite ugly, like “Kissing,” which begins, “Since the moment we met, my wife and I have not stopped kissing,” and ends, “Our lips are four broken scabs, and our chins always covered in blood, but we will never stop. We are far too much in love.” Satire, yes, but of what, exactly? Movie kissing? The answer may be evident here and there. Sometimes, as in “Indifferent,” there’s humor not yet so dry as to disappear altogether: “When, besotted, I casually suggested we get married, she shrugged her shoulder and, yawning, said, ‘Whatever.’” The spirit of Donald Barthelme hovers over some of the pages, as in “Normal”: “After a blazing row, Harmony joined the nuns. ‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘I’m joining the nuns.’” But Harmony didn’t like it with the nuns and came back, allowing Rhodes one of his humor’s higher flights: “‘We had to get up really early,’” says Harmony, “‘and they made us wear horrible long black dress things and no make-up, and sing all these boring songs.’” “Thankfully,” the tale concludes, “things quickly returned to normal, and now she’s back to spending her free time joining in with the commercials on TV, and making me get up from the sofa so she can look for her lighter.”
Blips (sometimes) of modern drollery, glimpsed on quickly turned pages, then gone forever.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50421-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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