An affecting and memorable volume.
Luminous collection of short fiction culled from the author’s experiences as a World War II veteran and psychoanalyst.
Real life seeps into each of Spohn’s stories, the results ranging from devastating to revelatory. In the poignant title piece, a widower who has lost his pregnant wife finds himself alone and homeless, scouring Manhattan’s streets for glass shards to complete a mosaic homage to his former life. In fact, the author often meditates on family. In “Fathers and Daughters,” several daughters rally around their father’s hospital deathbed to quibble and find closure. In “Emalyne,” an adult daughter finally comes to terms with her father’s molestation–by suing him in court. One of the collection’s longer stories, “David Shore, Ph.D.,” showcases Spohn’s experience as a mental health care professional. Shore, a busy clinical psychologist, receives a letter predicting his death and, rather than devastation, it results in a much-needed wake-up call. Although some of Spohn’s pieces feel overly rushed, they still manage to convey the overall tone and heft of the larger work. Slightly out of place in the collection, however, are “Diary of a Blind Man,” which depicts the interior monologue of a blind man about to experience a life-altering epiphany, and “ ‘If I Should Die Before I Wake…,’ ” in which a loving couple is haunted by the death of their young son. Both stories feel like unfinished precursors to future work. Several tales effectively tap into the author’s experience as an Army veteran and a German defector. “Leaving the Fatherland” is a searing chronicle of a psychoanalyst’s painful emigration from Nazi-occupied Germany to New York City in the 1930s, while the disillusionment of an Army soldier colors a man’s bittersweet tour of duty in “Becoming an American in Time of War.” Spohn’s economic prose is deceptively simple. He uses brief, clipped sentences, which effectively suggest a multilayered prism of emotions, characterizations and themes. This subtle debut will leave readers hungry for more.
An affecting and memorable volume.Pub Date: May 18, 2006
ISBN: 978-0-595-37705-3
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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