A gorgeous collection from a writer too often overlooked.
Stories about women that describe the everyday as well as the transcendent.
In the first story in this fine collection, a woman is walking home alone in the dark. Then a man hits her over the head from behind. It’s a spectacular act of violence, but the story doesn’t go in any direction you might reasonably expect. Instead, the woman, Irene, turns around and starts to speak with her assailant. “Don’t shout so loud,” she tells him, “someone might hear us.” “What on earth were you up to,” he asks, “all alone in the dark?” Then they divvy up the contents of her purse. They part on friendly terms. The story was first published in 1949; Bourdouxhe (Marie, 2001), who wrote in French, lived in Brussels and in Paris, where she befriended Simone de Beauvoir, among other luminaries. Her stories typically focus on women: their inner lives as well as the mundane details that occupy their days. In “Louise,” a maid borrows her employer’s nice blue coat for her evening off. In “Blanche,” a housewife daydreams as she washes the dishes and picks leeks in the garden. In every story, the banal becomes intimately intertwined with the sublime. Alone in the woods, Blanche feels a sense of peace. “Not that it was a happy or easy peace—nothing was happy or easy, either inside or outside her; it was a fiery peace, a peace that meant all is well.” Bourdouxhe’s prose is crisp, precise, and always understated. She’s a marvelous writer with an entirely unique vision of the world.
A gorgeous collection from a writer too often overlooked.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-78227-513-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
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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