Eight strange, quietly unhinged narratives by an author who reinvents the fairy tale with her postmodern approach.
A collection of quirky, twisted fairy tales for adults touching on loneliness, alienation and male domination; among the author’s previous projects is the children’s book The Girl in the Castle Inside the Museum (2008).
Streaked with absurdism, Bernheimer's odd little tales are told from the perspective of girls and young women who strive to rise above their unhappy circumstances through elaborate schemes. A 17-year-old living alone with her bird-hating mother conducts bedroom experiments with her parakeet, gets a job dancing topless in a suspended cage and moves into an apartment where she pursues "friendships that paid" in one room and builds the cage of her dreams for herself in another. A young wife keeps a menagerie in her basement, including a goat and a miniature pony, convincing herself that her indifferent husband might suspect something unusual is going on. A lame girl finds herself bedridden in a miniature cottage straight out of an old German folktale, where she is cared for by her faceless companion, cheered by a candle in the shape of a bluebird and transfixed by a portrait of a mysterious young girl. Unlike classic fairy tales, these are largely free of punishment and moral consequences, even as they allude to such dark subjects as rape, misogyny and the Holocaust. Bernheimer cites Peanuts as one of her influences, and this collection does have a certain comic-book sensibility. In these stories, childhood merges with adulthood, the former being no less difficult to understand than the latter. Except for an out-of-sync tale of sisters exploring themes of love and violence by acting out scenes from Star Wars, the stories are of a piece.
Eight strange, quietly unhinged narratives by an author who reinvents the fairy tale with her postmodern approach.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-56689-247-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2010
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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