It’s the approach here that varies rather than the theme. Still, a wide sampling from a promising talent.
A first collection of ten stories that explore modern romance and physical intimacy in a variety of styles and approaches, most often discovering a love that feels ancient.
The title piece is a love story that starts at a Safeway. It’s modern both in the way the lovers exchange their flirtations (AOL instant messaging) and in sexual preference (two men), but nevertheless it aims at purity and nostalgia by making its target the lovers’ first kiss. Sometimes the stories here are straightforward, other times distant and nearly without character, as in “What I Wanted Most of All,” a meditation that tries to demonstrate that one’s sexual indoctrination and career form a distinct narrative that touches everything else in one’s life as well. The dreamy pieces are the ones that please the most here, as though the very depersonalization of the tales makes their truths more intimate. There are echoes of Steve Dixon’s tone in works like “Twenty-Six Hours, Twenty-Five Minutes,” another dreamy monologue from bachelors trying to build a vocabulary for the dos and don’ts that make the ground rules of modern dating, and “Sweet Nothings,” in which an accidental compliment paid to a stranger in a restaurant is a springboard for a distant, almost characterless treatment of lonely affection. Other stories follow a woman whose romantic life seems to run parallel to events in pop culture (JonBenet, Princess Di), and a man who conducts a flirtatious relationship with a woman not his wife. Themes never stray far, as when a man in “Anything But a Gentleman” finds himself lingering over the picture of a woman in a magazine: “He wanted the end of all of that emotion that was the impetus of the sexual desire, the reason for the thrill of looking at the picture in the first place.”
It’s the approach here that varies rather than the theme. Still, a wide sampling from a promising talent.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-55597-379-5
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003
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
Visionary speculative stories that will change the way readers see themselves and the world around them: This book delivers...
Exploring humankind's place in the universe and the nature of humanity, many of the stories in this stellar collection focus on how technological advances can impact humanity’s evolutionary journey.
Chiang's (Stories of Your Life and Others, 2002) second collection begins with an instant classic, “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” which won Hugo and Nebula awards for Best Novelette in 2008. A time-travel fantasy set largely in ancient Baghdad, the story follows fabric merchant Fuwaad ibn Abbas after he meets an alchemist who has crafted what is essentially a time portal. After hearing life-changing stories about others who have used the portal, he decides to go back in time to try to right a terrible wrong—and realizes, too late, that nothing can erase the past. Other standout selections include “The Lifecycle of Software Objects,” a story about a software tester who, over the course of a decade, struggles to keep a sentient digital entity alive; “The Great Silence,” which brilliantly questions the theory that humankind is the only intelligent race in the universe; and “Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny,” which chronicles the consequences of machines raising human children. But arguably the most profound story is "Exhalation" (which won the 2009 Hugo Award for Best Short Story), a heart-rending message and warning from a scientist of a highly advanced, but now extinct, race of mechanical beings from another universe. Although the being theorizes that all life will die when the universes reach “equilibrium,” its parting advice will resonate with everyone: “Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so.”
Visionary speculative stories that will change the way readers see themselves and the world around them: This book delivers in a big way.Pub Date: May 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-101-94788-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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