In this magnificent book, we find the stories of every one of us: absent and present, dislocated and connected, at the mercy...
Means’ fifth collection cements his reputation as one of the finest, and most idiosyncratic, practitioners of short fiction in contemporary literature.
The 14 stories here revolve around themes of dislocation, in both the personal and the collective realms. Means begins with a declaration: “I’ve been writing stories for thirty years now,” he observes, “many published, others not published but trashed, put to bed, dead in the water….There’s simply no way to distill or describe what’s in the stories, except to say I attempt, to say the least, to respect whatever each story seems to want.” The conditionality is revealing; in many ways, it marks the ethos of the book. Stories, Means is saying, don’t happen to us so much as they grow out of us, which makes them connective in the deepest sense. And yet, as is also true of the work in his previous collections, connection is fleeting, illusory, incomplete. In “The Chair,” a father tries to discipline his young son even as he understands the gesture to be futile in a larger sense. Every moment, in other words, contains the seeds of its dissolution. “As I lifted him and felt his weight,” the narrator reflects, “the purity of the moment vanished and I would smell the stale, tart odor under his collar while he smelled, I suppose, the smoke and coffee on my breath and something else that later, at some point, perhaps even in memory, he would recognize as the first hints of decay.” The title story, on the other hand, looks at things from the other end of the telescope: an older man’s instructions for his funeral, written (as it must be) while he is still among the living; “Everything, right now, is safe and cozy,” the story concludes. Think about the implications of that sentence: a man sitting in the drowsy security of his own existence, writing lines to be read by someone else after he is gone.
In this magnificent book, we find the stories of every one of us: absent and present, dislocated and connected, at the mercy of our history, our narratives.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-27981-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
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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