Marotta (a Piece of Earth, 1985) links seven stories and a novella to make up his debut collection—Italian diaspora tales that easily transcend their ethnic theme in time and place. Though rooted in a fully imagined re-creation of the Sicilian migration to America, Marotta’s gently ironic narratives have the archetypal resonance of fable and folktale. There’s nothing nostalgic in the author’s depiction of life in the old country, specifically in Pianosanto, a mountain town near Palermo, where a wily seamstress, cheated of her pay by a wealthy family after the bride-to-be dies suddenly, tricks the dead girl’s older brother into marrying her homely and dimwitted daughter (—Seamstress—). Meanwhile, the dead bride’s sister, in —Her Sister,— marries the intended groom and uses her humility to achieve what her sister never could—a promise to go to America. The two learn in the New World, though, that things are no easier than at home and the women no less clever. In —The Boarder,— a widow’s daughter, who works in a candy factory, plots to scare away a male boarder so she can replace him with a husband. The duped brother of —Seamstress,— Nino, reappears (—In the Country—) to stake his future on a home far from the trolley line—and also regrettably far from friends in the old neighborhood. By the time of —His Right Arm,— Nino has lost everything but his stubborn pride. The novella (—Asphodel—) finds Nino and his wife, with their fortunes restored, embarked on a pilgrimage back to the old country, where Nino hopes to retaliate against the heartless moneylender who long ago bankrupted his family. Stingy and mean, Nino discovers that his nemesis has given himself to God and a life of penitence, while Nino’s wife has decided to stay in the place where she feels more at home. Events having come full circle, the arranged marriage of the first story begins again, without the pressures of poverty and family. For all their transparent negotiations, the immigrants of Marotta’s splendid fiction inhabit a world as complex as a Jane Austen novel. A delight.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-55071-032-X
Page Count: 186
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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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