Flavorful amuse-bouches from a talented chef.
Russian émigré Vapnyar follows her story collection There Are Jews In My House (2003) with this second small collection: six stories about immigrants in Brooklyn.
With one exception, the immigrants are Russian, coming to terms with America. Though food does indeed figure in all these stories, and an amusing, free-wheeling afterword includes recipes, food is not always essential to their development. Take “A Bunch of Broccoli on the Third Shelf.” Did Nina’s husband marry her in Russia because she was “his ticket to America”? She doesn’t think so; she has had ample evidence of his love; nonetheless, he leaves her. The story ends inconclusively with a cooking date with another guy, leaving the reader hungry for more insight into Nina’s failed marriage; to hell with the broccoli. In “Slicing Sautéed Spinach,” Ružena, a Czech immigrant, has weekly trysts with an American lover already committed to another woman, followed by restaurant meals at which she always eats spinach. That seems whimsical; the point of the story is the way Ružena outsmarts the American in their love game. “Salad Olivier” shows recent immigrant Tanya finding a boyfriend who bonds with her parents as they create Russia’s most popular holiday dish; it’s charming but slight. “Borscht” is more robust. Here carpet installer Sergey visits a part-time Russian prostitute. Alla turns him off sexually, but the famous soup creates a rapport; it’s the star of the show. Food is even more integral in “Luda and Milena.” Two elderly Russian women are competing for an even older Russian man; they are students in an ESL class, asked to bring dishes to an International Feast. To impress old Aron, they learn to cook overnight in this well-shaped tragic-comedy about loneliness and desire. In “Puffed Rice and Meatballs,” food is really the whole point as Katya recalls her Russian childhood, a time of deprivation underscored by the mad rush for rarely imported American junk food.
Flavorful amuse-bouches from a talented chef.Pub Date: June 3, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-375-42487-8
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2008
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
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.
One of America’s great novelists (Lost Memory of Skin, 2011, etc.) also writes excellent stories, as his sixth collection reminds readers.
Don’t expect atmospheric mood poems or avant-garde stylistic games in these dozen tales. Banks is a traditionalist, interested in narrative and character development; his simple, flexible prose doesn’t call attention to itself as it serves those aims. The intricate, not necessarily permanent bonds of family are a central concern. The bleak, stoic “Former Marine” depicts an aging father driven to extremes because he’s too proud to admit to his adult sons that he can no longer take care of himself. In the heartbreaking title story, the death of a beloved dog signals the final rupture in a family already rent by divorce. Fraught marriages in all their variety are unsparingly scrutinized in “Christmas Party,” Big Dog” and “The Outer Banks." But as the collection moves along, interactions with strangers begin to occupy center stage. The protagonist of “The Invisible Parrot” transcends the anxieties of his hard-pressed life through an impromptu act of generosity to a junkie. A man waiting in an airport bar is the uneasy recipient of confidences about “Searching for Veronica” from a woman whose truthfulness and motives he begins to suspect, until he flees since “the only safe response is to quarantine yourself.” Lurking menace that erupts into violence features in many Banks novels, and here, it provides jarring climaxes to two otherwise solid stories, “Blue” and “The Green Door.” Yet Banks quietly conveys compassion for even the darkest of his characters. Many of them (like their author) are older, at a point in life where options narrow and the future is uncomfortably close at hand—which is why widowed Isabel’s fearless shucking of her confining past is so exhilarating in “SnowBirds,” albeit counterbalanced by her friend Jane’s bleak acceptance of her own limited prospects.
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-185765-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
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