An evocative collection that suggests facets of the author’s vast experience with subtle, often beautiful language.
Lyrical short stories capture the personality of author Carew (Ghosts in Our Blood: With Malcolm X in Africa, England, and the Caribbean, 1995, etc.), his South American-Caribbean homeland and its people.
Combining elements of folklore and Guyanese patois with a sophisticated and contemporary eye, these very short stories depict a range of interesting misfits. Some of them are small, such as Belfon, a half-starved child, whose mother brings him to a white benefactor so she can return to her “wild, catch-as-catch-can life.” But most of Carew’s protagonists are larger than life, in both size and actions. Ti-Zek, for example, defies death, reviving a murdered friend and laughing, eventually, over the grave of their oppressor. Caesar, a gentle giant, also laughs, this time at the outright racism of a landlord, while somber Chantal, “built like a Watusi warrior,” is haunted by unhappy love. And for each of these flawed personalities, these mountains of masculinity, there’s a strong, outlaw woman, such as Belle, the six-foot-tall courtesan who could “fight like a tigress,” and Couvade, who initiates the 20-year-old Belfon. Characters recur in this thin collection, fleshing out overarching themes of individual strength and the search for identity. Rather than relying on plot, these brief episodes are profiles of a particular kind of courage. Poor people are fostered by the rich and wonder who they may become; bookish children find paths toward education; and young men follow paths to Europe and the United States. While the patois dialogue can be confusing, and at times may suggest a patronizing attitude toward uneducated country folk, the overall effect of these stories is magical. Almost written more in poetry than prose, they act like delicate gesture drawings, evoking personalities in crisis. By mixing the beauty of the tropics with the harsh realities of poverty, they create a series of striking portraits of a people and their place.
An evocative collection that suggests facets of the author’s vast experience with subtle, often beautiful language.Pub Date: July 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-932511-50-5
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Sarabande
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
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
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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