A winding journey into a wondrous land of imagination.
Twenty-one short stories—some surreal, others unsettling, several ineffably beautiful.
A feline creature morphs into a young girl. A carefree game of tag becomes fatal. Daylight arrives in the middle of the night. Rod Serling could have given a Twilight Zone intro to each story in this collection. Disturbing as many of them are, they tend to focus on the saving grace of redemption and on the transformation that comes with achieving true power. In “The Torchbearer,” the wonderful opening story, it’s the power to accept love at all costs; in “The Fountain,” it’s the power to feel young again; in “The Moon,” it’s the power to accept death; in “Light And Shadow,” it’s the power to see quite literally into the “inner workings of nature”; and in “The Party,” one of the collection’s best stories, it’s the power of an uninvited guest to kick-start a neighborhood gathering. Set mostly in the present day, the stories’ many varied locations range from Tribeca to Kansas to an enchanted garden. Narrators vary too—in age, sex and authority—but all experience a change that may take readers by surprise. As the titular character states in “Julie’s Big Day,” “[t]hings were fine before, but today they’re different.” The changes can be internal or external, as bodies are altered and faces morph. Having some characters appear so grotesque seems unwarranted, however, as does the inclusion of italic codicils at the ends of several stories. Similarly, the endings of a handful of other pieces seem to unsatisfyingly peter out, as in “The Windmill.” Not so, however, with the book’s last story, “The Hat.” As with the collection’s opening piece, in which a tightrope artist wows spectators by carrying a flaming torch at midnight across Niagara Falls, the final piece also involves a torch—but it’s a torch song, sung by a disheveled, tooth-missing gentleman captivating the raucous crowd of a midtown lounge.
A winding journey into a wondrous land of imagination.Pub Date: April 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1493716920
Page Count: 188
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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