Despite some pronounced highs and lows, a welcome gathering that showcases an unusually energetic and entertaining new...
A vivid mix of realism and fantasy (distinguished by editor Carter as “the gritty down-to-earth . . . [and work of] a profound metaphysical and fantastical bent”), in an engaging collection of prose poems, short stories, and novel excerpts by 26 young Scottish authors.
The briefer pieces (most less than a page long) are generally least impressive, partial exceptions being Jen Hadfield’s folklore-derived vignettes and Margaret Downie’s dreamy, imaginative “The Stone” and “Death.” Excerpts from longer works include Andrew Grieg’s offbeat examination of the wary mutual attraction between a young engineer and a tempestuous Western Islander (“Ammonia in Orkney”); Suhayl Saadi’s richly atmospheric look at immigrant South Asian street gangs (“Kings of the Dark House”); and Anne Donovan’s boisterous and delightful tale of an ordinary husband and father smitten with Eastern wisdom, narrated in thick, racy Glaswegian dialect (“Buddha Da”). Nothing else in the volume equals the wry hilarity of Donovan’s spirited little masterpiece, but several of the stories per se are not to be missed. Realism is well served by Edward Clapp’s “Nineteen Things I Remember About the West End of Glasgow,” the ruminations of a student who boards with a down-at-the-heels actress; Valerie Thornton’s sympathetic portrayal of a lonely motherless girl whose “ghost pets” insulate her from boys’ indifferent cruelty (“A Bird in the Hand”); and Tom Murray’s dramatization of the mingled guilt, sorrow and denial felt by an adolescent (“The Boy”) attending the funeral of his best (female) friend. Less conventional tales include Ali Smith’s annoyingly coy explication of how fictions develop (“The Universal Story”); Michael Faber’s astute look at the generation gaps that splinter a vacationing American family (“Vanilla-Bright Like Eminem”); and, notably, Linda Henderson’s contemporary fairy tale about a shepherd cursed with three “grotesque” daughters (“The Waters of Ulhava”).
Despite some pronounced highs and lows, a welcome gathering that showcases an unusually energetic and entertaining new literary culture.Pub Date: July 15, 2003
ISBN: 1-931236-26-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
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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