Heart-rending without a trace of sentimentality. McCabe’s eye is as sharp as his tongue, which has an edge that could cut...
Twelve stories, all set in rural Ireland in the 19th and 20th centuries.
McCabe (Death and Nightingales, 2002) has a deep sense of history and a dead-on eye for the long shadows that ancient griefs cast across the years. All of the characters here, in the author’s first collection to appear in the US, suffer to some degree for the sins of their ancestors, but McCabe shows them as something less than victims, insofar as most of them intensify their sufferings with transgressions of their own making. The priggish mother of the title piece, for example, justifies her provincial snobbery as the birthright of a dispossessed Catholic who has finally regained her place in society, only to discover a monstrous secret about her beloved son that destroys the family. Similarly, the deranged vagrant of “Roma,” who becomes obsessed with an innocent schoolgirl, is scandalized in the end to find that she is far more corrupt than he. In “Victorian Fields,” a sort of Rashomon transcript of 19th-century court proceedings, an abused woman swears out a complaint against her brother-in-law and husband—who, in turn, offer blood-curdling evidence of the woman’s own depravity. In “Truth,” a young boy is introduced to the grown-up world of misery and sin when his mother’s housemaid takes him to visit her sister in the slums of Glasgow. The finest stories are the last four—“The Orphan,” “The Master,” “The Landlord,” and “The Mother”—about the sufferings of the Great Famine as they are doled out (more equitably than you might have imagined) to the poor and the great who own, manage, and live in a poorhouse in Ulster: Reminiscent of William’s Trevor’s The News From Ireland in providing a deeply nuanced glimpse of misery in a history gone awry.
Heart-rending without a trace of sentimentality. McCabe’s eye is as sharp as his tongue, which has an edge that could cut glass.Pub Date: April 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-58234-427-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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
Visionary speculative stories that will change the way readers see themselves and the world around them: This book delivers...
Exploring humankind's place in the universe and the nature of humanity, many of the stories in this stellar collection focus on how technological advances can impact humanity’s evolutionary journey.
Chiang's (Stories of Your Life and Others, 2002) second collection begins with an instant classic, “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” which won Hugo and Nebula awards for Best Novelette in 2008. A time-travel fantasy set largely in ancient Baghdad, the story follows fabric merchant Fuwaad ibn Abbas after he meets an alchemist who has crafted what is essentially a time portal. After hearing life-changing stories about others who have used the portal, he decides to go back in time to try to right a terrible wrong—and realizes, too late, that nothing can erase the past. Other standout selections include “The Lifecycle of Software Objects,” a story about a software tester who, over the course of a decade, struggles to keep a sentient digital entity alive; “The Great Silence,” which brilliantly questions the theory that humankind is the only intelligent race in the universe; and “Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny,” which chronicles the consequences of machines raising human children. But arguably the most profound story is "Exhalation" (which won the 2009 Hugo Award for Best Short Story), a heart-rending message and warning from a scientist of a highly advanced, but now extinct, race of mechanical beings from another universe. Although the being theorizes that all life will die when the universes reach “equilibrium,” its parting advice will resonate with everyone: “Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so.”
Visionary speculative stories that will change the way readers see themselves and the world around them: This book delivers in a big way.Pub Date: May 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-101-94788-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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