A collection beginning with consistently engaging essays loses its footing in the dreary fiction that follows, bringing Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Kumin's (In Deep, 1987, etc.) latest to a wobbly end. The poet in Kumin is fully evident in her essays. With florid, not fussy, prose and precise observation, she chronicles life on her New Hampshire farm, elevating jicama (``a delightfully crunchy root I first met on an hors d'oeuvres platter in Texas ten years ago'') to unforeseen heights and reaping life lessons from an adopted city mutt and spindle-legged fillies. She's both a student and a teacher, rapturously researching and relating details of the world: She compares half a dozen mushroom field guides in search of edible fungi and choice passages; readers will feel able to buy, train, and breed horses on finishing ``A Horse for Fun.'' Some essays are anecdotal (``Mutts'' is a comic dog tale); others are philosophical (``Have Saddle, Will Travel'' is about horseback riding possibilities on reading tours); still others resemble diary entries (``Labors of Love'' records foals' births in earthy prose). Her interest in the most mundane subjects (the squash leaves covering a dung heap), her compulsive devotion to nature (she sleeps alongside pregnant mares when their delivery dates approach), and her ability to translate life into language (should the dog's name scan as a trochee or a spondee?) are infectious. But the short stories are everything the essays are not: rushed, blunt, and vague. Dominated by domestic configurations—daughter meets young stepmom, hunter beds vegan, three generations of women welcome the fourth—their characters are bland and the telling dispassionate. Every point and meaning is stated—no room for reader imagination or inference here. The best stories are ``The Cassandra Effect,'' about a troubled graduate student, and ``Flotation Devices,'' in which three women are stranded while snorkeling. Antiseptic stories pale beside lush and verdant nonfiction: an unfortunate coupling.
Pub Date: July 25, 1994
ISBN: 0-393-03655-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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
Visionary speculative stories that will change the way readers see themselves and the world around them: This book delivers...
Exploring humankind's place in the universe and the nature of humanity, many of the stories in this stellar collection focus on how technological advances can impact humanity’s evolutionary journey.
Chiang's (Stories of Your Life and Others, 2002) second collection begins with an instant classic, “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” which won Hugo and Nebula awards for Best Novelette in 2008. A time-travel fantasy set largely in ancient Baghdad, the story follows fabric merchant Fuwaad ibn Abbas after he meets an alchemist who has crafted what is essentially a time portal. After hearing life-changing stories about others who have used the portal, he decides to go back in time to try to right a terrible wrong—and realizes, too late, that nothing can erase the past. Other standout selections include “The Lifecycle of Software Objects,” a story about a software tester who, over the course of a decade, struggles to keep a sentient digital entity alive; “The Great Silence,” which brilliantly questions the theory that humankind is the only intelligent race in the universe; and “Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny,” which chronicles the consequences of machines raising human children. But arguably the most profound story is "Exhalation" (which won the 2009 Hugo Award for Best Short Story), a heart-rending message and warning from a scientist of a highly advanced, but now extinct, race of mechanical beings from another universe. Although the being theorizes that all life will die when the universes reach “equilibrium,” its parting advice will resonate with everyone: “Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so.”
Visionary speculative stories that will change the way readers see themselves and the world around them: This book delivers in a big way.Pub Date: May 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-101-94788-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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