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
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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