A thought-provoking collection that takes the concept of travel to the extreme.
An offbeat collection of stories about travelers flung to the farthest corners of the earth.
While most of the protagonists here are, in a sense, tourists, none of them are combing the souvenir stands at the Louvre or the Trevi Fountain. The author grounds the characters in situations that would be nightmares for the average vacationer, and often ends the story with an unexpected moment of beauty. In the title story, a couple on their honeymoon in the Sahara Desert are in grave danger when they find themselves six hours from the nearest oasis. As the husband is on the verge of dying from thirst, they are saved by a farmer tending a tree laden not only with fruit, but also with live goats standing on the branches. In “Traveling on Trains,” a man ponders his relationship with his estranged wife as he travels across China, encountering language barriers, stomach problems and other obstacles. “A Cambodian Tale, Part I” chronicles a father’s journey to Cambodia to find his college-dropout daughter and convince her to return home. As he shares a room in a sweltering, bug-laden hotel with another wanderlust young American, he continues to ruminate and worry about his daughter: “Behind him, in her dark room, Polly gasped again as though she were suffocating, and he couldn’t help but imagine if his daughter’s nights were spent like this.” In the collection’s final story, “A Cambodian Tale, Part II,” narrated by the daughter, she explains her decision to ditch her shallow college friends and join a charity group, and also why she eventually leaves it. The prose is occasionally clunky, and Rozgonyi tries to compensate with gratuitous description. But the author’s exploration of cultural detail is fascinating, and he places his characters in unusual, and extraordinarily interesting, scenarios. In particular, he deftly portrays how travel, especially to places so different from Western culture, effects emotional responses, for better or for worse.
A thought-provoking collection that takes the concept of travel to the extreme.Pub Date: April 29, 2006
ISBN: 0-9741999-6-6
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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