by Ismat Chughtai ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 12, 1994
Writing in Urdu, Chughtai (19151991) paved the way for modern Indian and Pakistani women writers to harshly probe their social milieu's double standards for men and women, rich and poor. Each of these 15 stories concerns marriage in one way or another, and most begin or end with a wedding. But don't expect happy romances; these are arranged, often brutal unions. The woman in ``The Quilt'' is so lonely in her husband's house that she takes a female servant as her lover; the beautiful young bride in ``The Veil,'' forbidden by Hindu tradition to remove her own veil, is thus forced to disobey her husband. While wedding guests heap praise on each bride's beauty, it is assumed that pregnancy will soon make them fat and ungainly. In ``The Eternal Vine,'' intense suspicion is aroused when the wife keeps her looks and indeed even looks younger as her husband ages. Even in this rigid society, a few young women manage to elope, usually with men of a different religion. Indeed, Chughtai's stories offer insightful glances into the conflicts faced when Muslims, Hindus, and Christians live side by side. As the book progresses, its focus shifts from the upper echelons to the servant class. Here, wives cannot be sent off; there's no money to pay for another bride, and it ``doesn't make a wit of difference, whether or not a servant maid enters wedlock.'' A maze of first, second, and third marriages—with unions between cousins, aunts, and uncles permitted—confuses reader and narrator alike: ``By some odd coincidence I was my mother's distant cousin as well, and by that token my father was also my brother-in-law,'' the youthful narrator of ``Aunt Bichu'' explains, pesenting one of the book's simpler equations. While the basic plots of these stories are engrossing, the characters aren't sufficiently individualized, possibly due to imperfections in the translation.
Pub Date: Sept. 12, 1994
ISBN: 1-878818-34-1
Page Count: 140
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
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by Tim O’Brien ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 28, 1990
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
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SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
by Rattawut Lapcharoensap ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2005
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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