Artfully crafted, if emotionally disconnected tales.
Klimasewiski (Creative Writing/Washington Univ.; The Cottagers, 2006) offers a collection of nine short stories previously published in magazines and anthologies.
The stories are divided into groups of three. Familial ghosts haunt tales that make up the body of the book. The first grouping, comprised of “The Third House,” “Some Thrills” and “The Last Time I Saw Richard,” tracks the psychic wreckage of Henry Korbusieski, a dissatisfied husband whose dalliances mark his unhappy life and that of his son Brian. Obsessed by a pivotal evening in his childhood, Brian suffers a disconcerting sense of déjà vu when comparing his romantic travails to those of his father. The second grouping measures the self-realizations of a culturally conflicted married couple during their time in New England. In “Tanner and Jun Hee,” the husband, Tanner, wonders if he really knows his wife Jun Hee, a Korean émigré, his concern escalated by the death of her mother in Korea. “Tanner” finds the husband balancing his aging mother’s suffering with his wife’s grief. In “Jun Hee,” the misgivings of the wife are confessed following her miscarriage. These dramas are constructed around the things that people don’t say to one another, with silences and gestures carrying meaning. Finally there are the historical works. The stories that bookend this collection, “Nobile’s Airship” and “Aëronauts,” track the rise and fall of two ambitious, tragic explorers: Italian airship captain Umberto Nobile and Swedish polar explorer Salomon August Andrée, respectively. The centerpiece and title story, “Tyrants,” is a neat bit of spy fiction that follows a reluctant recruit into Stalin’s house at the climax of World War II.
Artfully crafted, if emotionally disconnected tales.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-393-33096-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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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