Overall, Ali shows an almost anthropological interest in his characters, and a keen eye for the humanistic detail: a richly...
Ten lively, polished stories from Ghanian-American writer Ali about the transformation of Africa from old country to new.
Ali’s tales alternate between a hometown setting of Zongo Street—a densely populated neighborhood of Ghana’s bustling city of Kumasi, where the locals toil as small merchants—and the ethnic neighborhoods of New York City, where young Ghanian immigrants strive to make modern wages in predominantly white America. First, on Zongo Street, the 91-year-old Uwargida, one of the four widows of the Hausa King, shuffles out nightly to regale the neighborhood children with scary mythological tales, such as the story of the eternal dueling between the devil boy and the priest in “The Story of Day and Night.” In “Mallam Sile,” the eponymous bachelor tea-seller on Zongo Street marries the big, strong lady named Abeeba, whose daunting brawn intimidates her husband’s customers into settling their bills. “The Manhood Test” recounts hilariously the poignant events leading up to a husband’s having to prove his virility to his wife publicly while the old-lady lafiree judges. In “Man Pass Man,” the local swindler’s mean tricks on people lead to a terrifying interview with the devil himself. Transplanted to America, Ghanians have to tread carefully amid the entrenched racism of whites. In “Rachmaninov,” a young Ghanian artist hooks up drunkenly with a rich blonde American woman in the city and spends a terrifying night trying to sober her up rather than call 911 and risk a racial backlash. A Brooklyn musician in “The True Aryan” has to endure a tedious lecture in multicultural empathy by his Armenian cab driver; while the vulnerable domestic worker in “Live-in,” Shatu, a widow seeking work to support her three children back in Ghana, undergoes hostility from her elderly Long Island charge and untoward attention from her employer.
Overall, Ali shows an almost anthropological interest in his characters, and a keen eye for the humanistic detail: a richly rewarding cultural study.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-052354-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
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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