A book of provocative, gripping tales, replete with elaborative imagery, despite occasional hiccups.
Ekemar (El Reino Del Terror, 2015, etc.) provides 13 riveting short stories of suspense and intrigue.
A commute to work in overcrowded Mexico City turns out to be a journey of many twists and turns. A Chinese and a Russian general decide who will win a battle by having a contest that includes Russian roulette and a chess game using prisoners of war as live pieces. A man who has the power to have anything he wants discovers the deeper meaning and implications of having wishes come true. A con artist who thinks he hit the jackpot winds up in prison, but that’s just the beginning of a tale of one-upmanship. These are just some of the plots, places, and characters in these stories, which can all be aptly be described as page-turners. Ekemar enhances his engrossing plots with a finely honed gift for description and metaphor, whether he’s presenting his characters or the vast array of worldwide locations and historical settings they inhabit. In “Mad Captain Boccaccio and the Ship in the Desert,” for instance, the desert fire and the man beside it are palpable: “The boulders cast long shadows across the space that separated them, thumb-nosed by the dancing flames that interrupted the serenity of the place. The man wore a cape….It covered him completely from head to feet, and barely allowed one to imagine the bearded features of a weathered face well past fifty.” Occasionally, some details or historical settings seem more like mere stylistic devices, rather than elements that smoothly advance the story. In “Gift of a Golden Wish,” for example, the narrator’s innumerable wishes go on for pages and distract from the storyline. Fair warning to readers who may be sensitive to eerie images: a few stories may not be best before bedtime.
A book of provocative, gripping tales, replete with elaborative imagery, despite occasional hiccups.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5031-5908-2
Page Count: 236
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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