Tempered emotions and yearnings of the young and old define Tel’s stories: a pervasive sense of things gone amiss settles...
A particle physicist debuts with 17 stories, set largely in Israel, that capture something of the elusive quality of human dynamics, with unknown quantities and energies always seeming to play a part.
An Arab suicide bomber on the streets of Jerusalem is accosted by tourists to take their picture, in the story told within “A Story about a Bomb,” but the narrator’s lengthy search for the author of the bomber story leads him to a strange encounter—and the line between reality and fiction in that story becomes impossible to draw. “I May Be a Ghost but I’m Not a Slut” features an aging ambulance driver in a Tel Aviv café before his night shift who begins a conversation with a pale young woman in black next to him; she gets him talking about the suicides he’s seen, then tells him she is one herself and tries to get him to pass along a note to her lover. In “Mr. Fig and Mr. Pineapple” (the names of adjacent fruit stores), a middle-aged man tries to describe “The Incident,” which involved a platonic relationship the man had with a married woman; it began with a basket of strawberries and ended when the man’s wife happened to see the two of them on the TV news as they watched Mr. Pineapple burn. Finally, in the title story, a visitor to an Arab home in Nablus, while sipping tea, hears the tale of his host’s family: they were once rich and powerful enough to attract the enmity of the Sultan, who sent them the gift of an elephant, which they then had to keep alive; worse, the Sultan then came to see it and them, a visit which brought death and ruin to the family.
Tempered emotions and yearnings of the young and old define Tel’s stories: a pervasive sense of things gone amiss settles foglike among sharply defined moments to create some memorable scenes.Pub Date: March 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-58243-183-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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