Noted Scottish poet, novelist, and playwright Brown (A Time to Keep, 1987, etc.) celebrates the dark season of the year in the Orkney Islands with 18 always luminous if sometimes lifeless stories. Suffused with old Norse and Christian beliefs, the tales are all set in the northern islands once ruled by the Vikings. Many characters, like the stubborn farmer in ``The Paraffin Lamp,'' who uses the electric light only when he needs to fill his old lamp, still observe the traditional rituals, especially those of the Yule season, that ease the passing of winter. Inured to hardship and frugality, the islanders must contend with weather that is always changing (``one day is wind and flung spindrift, the next is loveliness beyond compare''). And this protean weather is sometimes center stage, as storms and blizzards dramatically take lives: In ``A Boy's Calendar'' and ``Dancey,'' two babies, the sole survivors of ships wrecked by terrible storms, are adopted by childless women and become islanders. In other pieces, the weather is simply part of the fabric of daily life: Men and women race to harvest crops before the rain comes, or to harvest fish before a blizzard strikes. Three notables are ``Lieutenant Bligh and Two Midshipmen,'' ``The Woodcarver,'' and ``A Boy's Calendar,'' in which, respectively, Bligh, of Mutiny on the Bounty fame, visits the islands and signs on two local men; an imaginative husband, who finds refuge from his acerbic wife in drink and carving, becomes an unwilling cultural icon; and a young boy describes the round of work and celebration in a typical year. Stories such as ``St. Christopher'' and ``The Road to Emmaus'' give the saint's life and the Crucifixion a local setting, while ``A Crusader's Christmas'' recalls the Viking era. Cumulatively, an affectionate but muted portrait of a far place where both heart and spirit are strong, though the days are often short and bitter.
Pub Date: Feb. 15, 1996
ISBN: 0-7195-5435-7
Page Count: 246
Publisher: John Murray Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1996
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
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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