The prolific Slavitt (Short Stories Are Not Real Life, etc.) here offers three first-person narratives—one Turkish and ancient, one 19th-century and Venetian, one contemporary—in a tour de force that attempts, only half-successfully, to interlink the stories in various ways. All the pieces concern family conflicts, in particular the predicament of a son who's not the beneficiary of primogeniture. In the first, Selim, the fourth son of a Turkish Sultan (``the son of a slave, for all the women...are slaves, are they not?''), is cared for by Hyacinth, ostensibly a eunuch. Selim: ``I was told over and over again to trust strangers if I had to but fear my relatives.'' The usual fate of a younger son is death, but Selim avoids that with the help of Hyacinth and a series of misadventures Ö la The Arabian Nights. The second narrative concerns Pietro, the second son of a 19th-century Venetian noble family; again, the fate of being born second results in misadventures, here foreshadowed by the death of Pietro's uncle Giancarlo, killed in a duel, and climaxed by Pietro's attempted elopement with his brother's fiancÇe. Foiled, Pietro is sent to a monastery. In the third story, Asher, a writer and American Jew, narrates his slice-of-life (in the form of an interview) from Cambridge, Massachusetts: a family with ``delusions of dynasty,'' a divorce, and the usual panoply of 20th-century problems. Finally, Slavitt tries nobly to tie all the stories together. Variations on the themes, then, of sexual repression and cruel family expectations that can be thwarted only by rebellion. Slavitt, still gifted, still erratic, carries it off with aplomb- -even when those loose ends either don't get tied up or get explained all too neatly.
Pub Date: April 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-8071-1813-3
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Louisiana State Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1993
The previous books of this author (Devil of a State, 1962; The Right to an Answer, 1961) had valid points of satire, some humor, and a contemporary view, but here the picture is all out—from a time in the future to an argot that makes such demands on the reader that no one could care less after the first two pages.
If anyone geta beyond that—this is the first person story of Alex, a teen-age hoodlum, who, in step with his times, viddies himself and the world around him without a care for law, decency, honesty; whose autobiographical language has droogies to follow his orders, wallow in his hate and murder moods, accents the vonof human hole products. Betrayed by his dictatorial demands by a policing of his violence, he is committed when an old lady dies after an attack; he kills again in prison; he submits to a new method that will destroy his criminal impulses; blameless, he is returned to a world that visits immediate retribution on him; he is, when an accidental propulsion to death does not destroy him, foisted upon society once more in his original state of sin.
What happens to Alex is terrible but it is worse for the reader.
Pub Date: Jan. 8, 1962
ISBN: 0393928098
Page Count: 357
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1962
SEEN & HEARD
Steinbeck's peculiarly intense simplicity of technique is admirably displayed in this vignette — a simple, tragic tale of Mexican little people, a story retold by the pearl divers of a fishing hamlet until it has the quality of folk legend. A young couple content with the humble living allowed them by the syndicate which controls the sale of the mediocre pearls ordinarily found, find their happiness shattered when their baby boy is stung by a scorpion. They dare brave the terrors of a foreign doctor, only to be turned away when all they can offer in payment is spurned. Then comes the miracle. Kino find a great pearl. The future looks bright again. The baby is responding to the treatment his mother had given. But with the pearl, evil enters the hearts of men:- ambition beyond his station emboldens Kino to turn down the price offered by the dealers- he determines to go to the capital for a better market; the doctor, hearing of the pearl, plants the seed of doubt and superstition, endangering the child's life, so that he may get his rake-off; the neighbors and the strangers turn against Kino, burn his hut, ransack his premises, attack him in the dark — and when he kills, in defense, trail him to the mountain hiding place- and kill the child. Then- and then only- does he concede defeat. In sorrow and humility, he returns with his Juana to the ways of his people; the pearl is thrown into the sea.... A parable, this, with no attempt to add to its simple pattern.
Pub Date: Nov. 24, 1947
ISBN: 0140187383
Page Count: 132
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1947
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