While the stories in this collection can be hit or miss, those that succeed are well-imagined and richly textured.
Myka’s fiction debut is a collection of short stories set in Romania about the complications that arise—in suburban homes and in brothels, among families, friends, and lovers—when Romanian and Western cultures collide.
These stories focus on their characters' isolation as they struggle to find a place in an unfamiliar world. Although related, not all the stories are created equal. “Lessons in Romanian” and “Manna from Heaven” look at American women working in Romania and, in both the protagonists' alienation from and uncertainty about their environment, emphasize an estrangement from American culture as well. But while “Manna” uses food—more specifically live meat—as an engaging way to explore its subject, “Lessons” is a more cursory treatment, without intricacy or substance. Similarly, when the first story in the collection introduces us to Dragos, a boy living in a Romanian orphanage, it makes obvious connections that take expected, tiresome routes. Later, however, in “Song of Sleep,” we meet Dragos as an adult recently married to an American woman. What follows is a complicated, emotionally nuanced view of their relationship that manages to ring true to human experience while feeling as though it could take place only on a small farm in the remote Romanian countryside. The longest tale in the collection, “Song of Sleep” is perhaps also the strongest; we want Dragos' marriage to succeed, but the struggles it faces will not be denied, and the bleak realities of life on the farm only emphasize this. The most consistently compelling stories are those centered on Irina, following her from a 13-year-old surviving on the streets (“Rol Dobos”) to a young woman working in a brothel (“Palace Girls”). Her struggle to find agency in a world that thrives on the powerless is underscored by a forceful determination that leaves the reader both impressed and slightly afraid for her.
While the stories in this collection can be hit or miss, those that succeed are well-imagined and richly textured.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-886157-99-6
Page Count: 215
Publisher: BkMk/Univ. of Missouri-Kansas City
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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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