A second collection from Papanikolas (Small Bird, Tell Me, not reviewed) that movingly details the struggles of Greek immigrants in America and their descendants, torn between the consolations and the constrictions of the old ways. These are quiet, domestic stories of a people shaped by a past and by religious rituals so ingrained that even the young can never entirely ignore them. Papanikolas's Greeks live in small towns, where they form close-knit communities. The lives of parents and grandparents revolve around family, church, and social clubs, but the younger generation seems eager to embrace a new identity as Americans. The title piece (the collection's best) is an affecting account of one woman's struggle both to shape and retain her identity. Athena, the youngest child of Greek immigrants, has (unlike her older sisters) gone to college and married outside the community; she suffers a severe breakdown when her eldest son, Paul, a zealous Mormon, pressures her to renounce the old faith and become a full-fledged Mormon. In other notable stories, Kallie, a young woman working in a hospital during the Depression, is stunned by the prejudice she encounters and fears that she'll have no choice but to marry within the suffocating confines of the local Greek community (``Country Hospital, 1939''); the acutely observed jealousies that are provoked by success cause two sisters and their husbands, once best friends, to grow apart (``Neither Nose Nor Ass''); and the differences between the old ways of doing things, and the often shocking new, are noted as women prepare for a church celebration (``Getting Ready for the Festival''). ``If I Don't Praise My House'' deals with a widow's encounter with old grievances; in ``The People Garden,'' an old woman finds that her garden stirs vivid memories of vanished family members. Evocative portraits of a people on the cusp, and of a culture caught in its dying but still resonant last moments.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-8040-0993-7
Page Count: 261
Publisher: Swallow Press/Ohio Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1996
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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