Finally, in the post-glasnost era, Russian women are taking a stand against the male-dominated literary establishment and publishing their own anthologies—a courageous act that may turn them into heroines, if not great writers. Here, two of the nine stories collected and translated by Soviet-born freelance journalist Gessen stand as literary gems that don't require her clamorous introductions to prop them up within a sociopolitical context. In ``The Day of the Poplar Flakes,'' by Marina Paley (a 1992 Booker Prize nominee), the happiness of a young female intern is shattered on her first day in the intensive care unit when she witnesses a dying patient's deplorable treatment. ``The Clean Zone,'' by Siberian-born Irina Polianskaya, addresses similar issues through a cancer patient's eyes as she waits for surgery in a crowded room and remembers her youth in a prison camp, where her scientist father did atomic research. Tarasova's ``She Who Bears No Ill'' is also an accomplished, if overlong, Kafkaesque tale written in the early 1980s but not published until recently. The story's main character suffers from a disfiguring, degenerative disease and chooses to lock herself in a mental institution rather than live with the disgust of her family and neighbors. The six remaining stories seem like the work of neophytes compared to these. Lengthy and sprawling, they lack both focus and narrative drive. One, the most radical and explosive in the collection, is apparently so shocking by Russian standards that it has never before been published; but Natalia Shluga's 41- page ``Mashka and Asiunia,'' described by Gessen as ``lesbian fiction,'' is so convoluted, unfocused, and obscure that the lesbian angle would be entirely missed if not for Gessen's exuberant and pointed introduction. Of sociological significance, no doubt, for Russophiles and students of Soviet history; but, for most, only thinly rewarding.
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-57344-007-8
Page Count: 269
Publisher: Cleis
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
War is hell in this novel of inspired absurdity.
Hailed as heroes on a stateside tour before returning to Iraq, Bravo Squad discovers just what it has been fighting for.
Though the shellshocked humor will likely conjure comparisons with Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse Five, the debut novel by Fountain (following his story collection, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, 2006) focuses even more on the cross-promotional media monster that America has become than it does on the absurdities of war. The entire novel takes place over a single Thanksgiving Day, when the eight soldiers (with their memories of the two who didn’t make it) find themselves at the promotional center of an all-American extravaganza, a nationally televised Dallas Cowboys football game. Providing the novel with its moral compass is protagonist Billy Lynn, a 19-year-old virgin from small-town Texas who has been inflated into some kind of cross between John Wayne and Audie Murphy for his role in a rescue mission documented by an embedded Fox News camera. In two days, the Pentagon-sponsored “Victory Tour” will end and Bravo will return to the business as usual of war. In the meantime, they are dealing with a producer trying to negotiate a film deal (“Think Rocky meets Platoon,” though Hilary Swank is rumored to be attached), glad-handing with the corporate elite of Cowboy fandom (and ownership), and suffering collateral damage during a halftime spectacle with Beyoncé. Over the course of this long, alcohol-fueled day, Billy finds himself torn, as he falls in love (and lust) with a devout Christian cheerleader and listens to his sister try to persuade him that he has done his duty and should refuse to go back. As “Americans fight the war daily in their strenuous inner lives,” Billy and his foxhole brethren discover treachery and betrayal beyond anything they’ve experienced on the battlefield.
War is hell in this novel of inspired absurdity.Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-088559-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
A fine demonstration of the power and versatility of Glück’s verse, this volume will delight fans and intrigue newcomers.
Glück’s international reputation as an accomplished and critically acclaimed contemporary poet makes the arrival of her new volume an eagerly anticipated event. This slender collection meets these expectations with 44 poems that pull the reader into a realm of meditation and memory. She sets most of them in the heat of summer—a time of year when nature seems almost oppressively heavy with life—in order to meditate on the myriad realities posed by life and death. Glück mines common childhood images (a grandmother transforming summer fruit into a cool beverage, two sisters applying fingernail polish in a backyard) to resurrect the intense feelings that accompany awakening to the sensual promises of life, and she desperately explores these resonant images, searching for a path that might reconcile her to the inevitability of death. These musings produce the kinds of spiritual insights that draw so many readers to her work: she suggests that we perceive our experiences most intensely when tempered by memory, and that such experiences somehow provide meaning for our lives. Yet for all her metaphysical sensitivity and poetic craftsmanship, Glück reaffirms our ultimate fate: we all eventually die. Rather than resort to pithy mysticism or self-obsessive angst, she boldly insists that death creeps in the shadows of even our brightest summers. The genius of her poems lies in their ability to sear the summertime onto our souls in such a way that its “light will give us no peace.”
A fine demonstration of the power and versatility of Glück’s verse, this volume will delight fans and intrigue newcomers.Pub Date: April 9, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-018526-0
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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