Plodding and pretty lifeless for ghost stories, these tales suffer from glacial pacing, pale narration, and a largely...
Five novella-vriations on Hirshberg’s usual themes of horror and hauntings (The Snowman’s Children, 2002).
Hirshberg writes more in the tradition of H.P. Lovecraft than Poe, creating a sense of dread with an atmosphere of weirdness and foreboding rather than relating any events of actual horror. It’s an approach than can manage to raise a shiver or two, but you have to have some time on your hands, for the author is rarely in any rush to set his scenes. The smart-ass kid who is the central figure in “Struwwelpeter,” for example, seems to be leading us into a tale that’s basically concerned with his delusions—until it becomes clear by the end that the abandoned house at the center of his annual Halloween pranks may actually be haunted after all. Other pieces here are even more psychological, in a Henry James–ish kind of way: “Shipwreck Base” describes the eventual ruin of a guilt-racked young man who can’t get over his complicity in a young man’s accidental death, while the title story portrays a father obsessed with his two children who died years before. Hirshberg’s characters also suffer from the weight of history to an unusual degree: The teacher who suffers a breakdown while leading a field trip of schoolchildren through the death camps of Eastern Europe finds himself confronted with the memory of his part in the death of his grandfather (a camp survivor), while the pompous Montana college professor who asks his students to investigate the veracity of ghost sightings in a small western town begins to experience some weird phenomena himself.
Plodding and pretty lifeless for ghost stories, these tales suffer from glacial pacing, pale narration, and a largely uninvolving cast.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7867-1255-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
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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