A diminutive book that speaks volumes about “the ghostly existence of émigrés,” one that haunts the reader’s imagination.
The legacy of world war and the experience of exile provide a rich texture of loss and longing in nine stories from a prominent Argentinean-born filmmaker and author.
Cozarinsky’s second collection (after Urban Voodoo, 1990) is bracketed by two masterpieces, beginning with the unusual title story, about a young Jew, in 1890, preparing to embark for Buenos Aires to await his reluctant bride-to-be’s later arrival—only to be accompanied instead by the non-Jewish woman who impulsively begs to become his “wife.” In the haunting final story, “Émigré Hotel,” a Jewish protagonist travels from Argentina to Lisbon, obsessed by the story of his grandparents having fallen in love there in 1940—only to learn more than he wishes to know about his family’s angry, tangled history. The plot similarity that links these two pieces comes as a dazzling, moving surprise as deracinated characters also figure in the poignant “Christmas ’54,” about a Viennese writer in South America who relieves his loneliness by hiring “aimless, hungry-looking young men” for sex; and also in the portrayal of a Berlin pianist who can’t live either in his native or his adopted culture (“Days of 1937”); and in “Budapest,” about an itinerant art forger whose memories of his mother’s Romanian youth and adulthood dissuade him from fleecing an elderly “victim” of the Nazis’ appropriation of Europe’s artistic treasures. And yet even stronger is the masterly “Literature,” whose narrator pays belated homage to the Russian émigré woman who’d introduced him to her country’s great writers while grieving for her brother, perished at Dachau. This deceptively simple Chekhovian story resonates thunderously, most notably in one of contemporary fiction’s indelibly memorable images: “. . . although there were no trees in the camp, the ground was strewn with yellow leaves.” The “leaves” are, of course, the cloth stars worn by Jewish prisoners.
A diminutive book that speaks volumes about “the ghostly existence of émigrés,” one that haunts the reader’s imagination.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-374-11673-3
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
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
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