Well-crafted, oddly dated.
A British newcomer details the often melodramatic outcomes of deception, innocent and malicious, in four tales that seem more echoes of the past than soundings of the present.
In each, the denouement offers an old-fashioned twist: a technique that is most effective in the first and best, least in the third. Simone Strachey, the narrator of the “Island of the Day Before Yesterday,” is a complacent academic who lives in Italy with his aristocratic wife in the well-appointed castle he inherited from his Italian mother. A semiotician, he begins his story by blaming Umberto Eco, “who had brought a temporary glamour to the otherwise forgettable concept of an ‘Italian semiotician,’’’ for what he does after his English father dies. While he’s in London sorting out that father’s estate—he was a man of action with a gift for writing, author of a series of popular books—Strachey is approached by a journalist who wants to write about his family. Strachey agrees but enlists his homely secretary to play a trick on the journalist—a trick that inevitably backfires with far-reaching consequences. The second novella, “Law and Order,” is set in Holland and narrated by Hendrik, a wealthy college student who records his concerns as his twin brother falls under the nihilist influence of a professor, and begins carrying a gun. In the Kiplingesque “The Colonel and Judy O’Grady,” an Irishwoman, who became a Buddhist nun and is now working in Scotland, tells a young lesbian graduate student of her encounter, in Simla, India, with a kindly colonel, who was not what he seemed. And last, “Crossing the Water,” is narrated by a free-loading and louche art dealer, temporarily estranged from his lawyer wife, who records a country-house prank—the theft from a nearby cousin’s home of a famous painting—that goes horribly wrong.
Well-crafted, oddly dated.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2000
ISBN: 0-618-04933-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
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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