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STEALING THE FIRE

Tales of difficulty and trial, written with heart and offering moments of recognition throughout.

In her debut collection, Ciabattari is a master of transformation as she gives these stories of loss, woe, crisis, and collapse the salutary and sometimes bracing pleasures of plain good fiction.

The title story in some ways is the best, certainly the most literary, and readers might wish it to have been last instead of first. A troubled young woman’s divorced father, a writer, dies at 47 of degenerative heart disease, but not before handing on to his daughter the desire to write—and an understanding, in the blood, of the enormity of the calling and the terrible difficulty of it (“Write what cannot be said,” he tells her). Symbols often fall into place with a proper lightness, as in “Totem,” when Indian monuments in the Pacific Northwest provide solace for a woman who’s recently suffered a miscarriage. “A Pilgrimage” rings less true: a widow travels to a warring El Salvador on an errand of mercy and witnesses violent death, but the character remains under-realized for the reader to join in the story’s feeling. The enormity of a missed life, however, is more easily felt in “The Almost-Perfect Man,” when an academic realizes that the life she should have had will never be hers. In the lesser “Once in a Blue Moon,” a woman thinks back wistfully on the missions and music of the ’60s, and in “Gridlock,” the marriage of two actors suffers lean times until an adjustment is made. More powerful and emotionally full are “Payback Time” (a young man in Silicon Valley has the bottom fall out of his world), “Memorial Day” (a woman’s grown son has behavioral problems that bring cataclysm and tragedy), and the Salinger-echoing study, “Wintering at Montauk,” about a 30-year-old who’s been a failure at everything he’s tried and now, alone in his parents’ beach house for the winter, watches himself fall apart.

Tales of difficulty and trial, written with heart and offering moments of recognition throughout.

Pub Date: May 1, 2001

ISBN: 1-886435-11-1

Page Count: 168

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002

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THE THINGS THEY CARRIED

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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SIGHTSEEING

STORIES

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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