A debut collection from Danticat (the novel Breath, Eyes, Memory, 1994) that movingly brings to life the history, hopes, and human experience of Haitians. Separation is the central fact of life for Danticat's characters. The isolated speakers of "Children of the Sea" are lovers, one of whom flees Haiti on a rickety boat while the other remains on the island hiding from terrorizing soldiers. They are doomed never again to be together in the flesh. Yet the story itself — the very act of Danticat's writing (mirrored in the refugee's journal-keeping) — permits their union, grants a space in which their voices mingle in an elegant duet. Where writing can't serve as a weapon against oblivion, there is hope, though this is double-edged. For Guy, the unemployed factory worker in "A Wall of Fire Rising," a hot-air balloon represents an escape from devastating poverty, but the story ends by showing the bitter irony of his wish for flight. Most impressive is the dignity that the author reveals in her characters' spirituality. Omens and superstitions abound, which upper-class Haitians dismiss as "voodoo nonsense that's holding us back." Danticat shows the wisdom and poignancy of these beliefs. The red panties that the mother in "Caroline's Wedding" commands her daughters to wear serve ostensibly to ward off sexual advances from their dead father's spirit. They are also an intimate form of mourning his loss. "When you write," explains the speaker of "Epilogue: Women Like Us," "it's like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse strands and attempting to bring them unity....Some of the braids are long, others short. Some are thick, others are thin." The remark describes this young Haitian writer's restless style, which is lyrical and elegiac, gothic and simple, sometimes all at once. Consistent, however, is her powerful empathy for her characters. Danticat's fiction is an antidote to headline abstractions, giving readers the gift of narrative through which to experience a people and a country as more than mere news.
Pub Date: April 10, 1995
ISBN: 1-56947-025-1
Page Count: 227
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
Four stories and a novella, linked by their depictions of conflict, mostly racial, in a second collection from McKnight (after The Kind of Light That Shines on Texas, 1992). There's nothing particularly distinctive about McKnight's storytelling, though he tries for affect with first-person narratives. Still, the voices here all sound alike, though two shorter pieces—``He Sleeps'' and ``Palm Wine''—do seem to be told by the same character. Both concern an African-American researcher in Senegal who's collecting proverbs for his dissertation in folklore. In the first, he finds himself dreaming fecund narratives that reflect both the sexual mess he left back home and the torrid lovemaking he overhears in the next room. His retellings, though, are deflated by his native guide, who reminds him that dreams mean only one thing—you're asleep. The narrator's increasing frustration with the Senegalese leads to a lot of bad vibes (and defeats any sense of Roots-y solidarity). In the latter story, his quest for the legendary native elixir leaves the teller where he began: queasy, suspicious, and angry. The slangier narrators of ``The More I Like Flies'' and ``Boot'' complain about life stateside. The first is told by a young black civil servant who works in the Air Force Academy kitchen and resents his co-workers for their lack of sympathy and, once, their racial commentaries. Race matters less in ``Boot,'' about hierarchical conflict in the military and the narrator's regret that he sided with a whiny complainer rather than with his D.I. The long title piece explores interracial life on an Air Force base in Louisiana, where a bootstraps-and-stern-minded African-American family moves next to a white family whose racial attitudes are far more confused than anyone realizes, including a legacy of miscegenation, lust, do- gooderism, and simple friendship, all coming out in twisted fashion. Cultural conflict and racial wounds: McKnight sounds few unusual notes in this competent if not compelling volume.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8050-4829-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A second collection (after Typical, 1991) from the author of the novel Edisto Revisited (1996), etc.: nine pieces—some previously published in Esquire and Harper's—suggesting that Powell may now be one of our most linguistically inventive writers. His landscape is a South defined (that ``vale of dry tears'') by Faulkner, Ray Charles, and Andy of Mayberry, peopled with characters who flirt with madness and find the perfect language to reveal their inner turmoil. The bored housewife in ``Trick or Treat'' encourages the attentions of an unlikely suitor, a 12-year-old ``Lolito'' with a singular crush. Powell brilliantly captures the voice of his brain-damaged narrator in ``Scarliotti and the Sinkhole,'' the sad and loony ravings of a moped accident victim as he drinks beer, forgets to take his meds, and waits for his hefty settlement check. The lowest of the low, the roofer of ``Wayne,'' feels left behind by the times, not to mention his wife and kids. The three parts of ``All Along the Watchtower'' start with the drunken lyricism of its ``classical anarchist'' narrator, a Peeping Tom who skips his outpatient appointment at a mental-health clinic to fly to Mexico in search of a 50-pound chihuahua, which he finds, along with a sexy nurse who has a huge supply of Percodan. This leads into a prose-poem rant by a stroke victim—a defense of silliness and quitting—and ends with the too-long fable of loneliness and twisted desire that takes place along the watchtower, looking over ``a giant spoilbank of broken hearts.'' Powell's other man-boys, who resist being ``properly stationed in Life,'' include the abandoned dad and husband of ``Dump'' and two guys in ``Two Boys'' who seek out a Chinese healer for their various afflictions. The boozing strip-club habituÇ of ``A Piece of Candy'' comes to the sobering revelation, being now a father himself, that all those women are also daughters. If Powell crashes here and there, it's because he's raised the bar so high: This is fiction that provokes, challenges, and renews your faith in possibility.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8050-5213-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1997
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