A curious debut collection of linked stories by a young German writer who explores relations between his own country and Russia and various expressions of the Russian temperament, while also offering what seem parodies ofand homages toRussian writers in both vignettes and fully developed tales that ostensibly constitute ``an ongoing discussion concerning the value of happiness.'' Schulze prefaces the stories with a frame in which a woman traveling by train across Europe to Petersburg enjoys a brief encounter with a German businessman named Hofmann, who leaves behind him a manuscript containing these taleswhich the lady passes to ``I.S.,'' urging him to ``lend these fantasies your name.'' The stories, which usually but not invariably observe Russian behavior from a Teutonic viewpoint, variously present comic-grotesque evidence of a people notable for their ``vast hospitality'' (a woman doctor who administers highly unprofessional last rites, so to speak, to a dying old man is hailed as a ``saint''; street vendors seize a wealthy businessman and write their names and addresses on his body), desperate poverty (a widow without means prospers when an American named Nickand who may be St. Nicholasmarries in succession each of her surviving daughters), and political passion (a widow Communist goes door-to- door defending the Party's ideals; a temperamental painter destroys his canvases because they don't portray the ``sufferings of his people''yet, in so doing, embodies ``the despair of the artist''). Nor does Schulze spare his own culture. One story describes a naive traveler's (Hofmann's?) idealization of the prostitute he keeps encountering in hotels, and another recounts the unfortunate fate of a German restaurateur who seeks artifacts from the czarist period as decorations, and unintentionally awakens still-heated memories of WW II. A rather mixed bag, though Schulze's sardonic intelligence and feeling for cultural contrasts give these seemingly disparate tales a pleasing unity and coherence.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-375-40029-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1998
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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