Full of the smells and cadences of the old country, these are pleasant, whimsical tales with personality and a...
Seven tales from provincial Brazil make up Monteiro’s quaint, sparkling debut.
A strange, colorful fish discovered in an elderly wife’s outhouse latrine in arid Jatobá turns out to be a miraculous worker of miracles in the first story, “A Fish in the Desert.” Married 40 years without a child, Otália has been praying for one (while her husband has been praying for a glimpse of the ocean), but instead she finds a fish of radiant colors she names Saturnino. Despite the miracles it delivers, like curing her husband of his lameness, the fish is deemed cursed, and, afraid for its life at the hands of angry townspeople, Otália returns it to the sea for a final, loving baptism. The local priest who erroneously pronounced the fish divine appears in another story, “The Ecstasy of São Mercúrio,” as he journeys far away to a new parish in the Amazonian forest of Bororó. Here, innocent and well-meaning Padre Miguel Inácio confronts the chilling corruption of the master of the silver and gold mines, Boca de Ouro, who literally owns the souls of his workers and poisons the Padre with his evil. Yet another character touched by the fish returns, in “Ouroboros.” Having been cursed by the fish never to die, Uriel Augusto seeks out Pascoal the seer to perform the ultimate alchemy: the transformation into death. “Little Star of Bela Lua” tells of a rare famous woman troubadour, Estrelinha, who recounts how she nearly married the man who beat her in a repente duel (a kind of rhyming contest and guitar showdown), except that he never claimed his prize. Another homespun tale, “Curado,” involves a country doctor’s history of having been bitten by a viper, marking him as a friend to snakes forever, despite the misgivings of his pregnant fiancée.
Full of the smells and cadences of the old country, these are pleasant, whimsical tales with personality and a gentle-pedaling Christian message.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-883285-26-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Delphinium
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2005
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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