Only the strengths of “Coley’s War” give the collection its stature.
Debut collection of seven stories and a novella, by Arkansas poet and translator Williams.
All of these pieces have appeared in small literary presses. The first, “One Saturday Afternoon,” takes place in a small southern town just before WWII and concerns young boy Kelvin Fletcher’s typical Saturday at the movies, his finding a litter of baby rats he thinks are dogs and, when he takes them home, of reluctantly drowning them at his mother’s command. “The Year Ward West Took Away the Raccoon and Mr. Hanson’s Garage Burned Down” tells of Kelvin on Sundays going about the countryside with his preacher grandfather; of a school friend who drowns; and of Kelvin’s decision not to be a preacher. “The Wall” has the boy climbing a tower of chairs to peep through a hole into the girls’ locker room and coming to grief. While this amuses, the amusement lies in the event, not in the telling: You hear Twain or Salinger telling the same story and their voices stamping your memory with a permanent blue dye. In most of the tales, Kelvin weighs his religious belief and finds it fading, especially in “There Aren’t Any Foxes in That Cave,” while in “Truth and Goodness” he loses his virginity to Salina May Becker behind the church pulpit, with the red, green, purple, blue and yellow of the communion cloth under her bare body. The novella “Coley’s War” is about Kelvin and three college buddies, all led by Coley, who wants to go down to Latin America and join Martinez the revolutionary. The group sets off in a car. Sex, a supposed death, and brief jail time in Mexico follow as the Mexican police take the gringos for mucho dinero. Kelvin and Coley go on, guided by an old Mexican and by 19-year-old Marta. They meet stupefying horrors as Kelvin gets used to the idea of dying—as he should.
Only the strengths of “Coley’s War” give the collection its stature.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-8203-2439-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
A welcome introduction to a major author and a pleasure for fans of contemporary European literature.
Thoughts on travel as an existential adventure from one of Poland’s most lauded and popular authors.
Already a huge commercial and critical success in her native country, Tokarczuk (House of Day, House of Night, 2003) captured the attention of Anglophone readers when this book was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2018. In addition to being a fiction writer, Tokarczuk is also an essayist and a psychologist and an activist known—and sometimes reviled—for her cosmopolitan, anti-nationalist views. Her wide-ranging interests are evident in this volume. It’s not a novel exactly. It’s not even a collection of intertwined short stories, although there are longer sections featuring recurring characters and well-developed narratives. Overall, though, this is a series of fragments tenuously linked by the idea of travel—through space and also through time—and a thoughtful, ironic voice. Movement from one place to another, from one thought to another, defines both the preoccupations of this discursive text and its style. One of the extended stories follows a man named Kunicki whose wife and child disappear on vacation—and suddenly reappear. A first-person narrator offers a sort of memoir through movement, recalling her own peregrinations bit by bit. There are pilgrims and holidaymakers. Tokarczuk also explores the connection between travel and colonialism with side trips into “exotic” practices and cabinets of curiosity. There are philosophical digressions, like a meditation on the flight from Irkutsk to Moscow that lands at the same time it takes off. None of this is to say that this book is dry or didactic. Tokarczuk has a sly sense of humor. It’s impossible not to laugh at the opening line, “I’m reminded of something that Borges was once reminded of….” Of course someone interested in maps and territories, of the emotional landscape of travel and the difference between memory and reality would feel an affinity for the Argentine fabulist.
A welcome introduction to a major author and a pleasure for fans of contemporary European literature.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-53419-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in...
Huzzah! Martin (The Ice Dragon, 2014, etc.) delivers just what fans have been waiting for: stirring tales of the founding of the Targaryen line.
Duncan—Dunk for short—has his hapless moments. He’s big, nearly gigantic, “hugely tall for his age, a shambling, shaggy, big-boned boy of sixteen or seventeen.” Uncertain of himself, clumsy, and alone in the world, he has every one of the makings of a hero, if only events will turn in that direction. They do, courtesy of a tiny boy who steals into the “hedge knight” Dunk’s life and eventually reveals a name to match that of Ser Duncan the Tall—an altogether better name, at that, than Duncan of Flea Bottom would have been. Egg, as the squire calls himself, has a strange light about him, as if he will be destined to go on to better things, as indeed he will. Reminiscent of a simpler Arthur Rackham, the illustrations capture that light, as they do the growing friendship between Dunk and Egg—think Manute Bol and Muggsy Bogues, if your knowledge of basketball matches your interest in fantasy. This being Martin, that friendship will not be without its fraught moments, its dangers and double crosses and knightly politics. There are plenty of goopily violent episodes as well, from jousts (“this time Lord Leo Tyrell aimed his point so expertly he ripped the Grey Lion’s helm cleanly off his head”) to medieval torture (“Egg…used the hat to fan away the flies. There were hundreds crawling on the dead men, and more drifting lazily through the still, hot air.”). Throughout, Martin delivers thoughtful foreshadowing of the themes and lineages that will populate his Ice and Fire series, in which Egg, it turns out, is much less fragile than he seems.
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in addition, they succeed in making fans want more—and with luck, Martin will oblige them with more of these early yarns.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53348-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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