A smart, empathetic, well-crafted first collection—Antopol is a writer to watch.
The impressive debut collection by Antopol (National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Awardee; Wallace Stegner Fellow) features a variety of settings—Israel, Belarus, California, Poland, Maine—and characters, but it also has an unusual cohesiveness for a first collection.
Most of the characters here are Jews of Eastern European extraction; most are grappling, in one way or another, with issues of estrangement: from home, from family members, from the big ideological/idealistic causes they once espoused, from themselves. In “The Unknown Soldier,” set in California at the time of Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunts, a young Russian-American actor emerges from a year in prison for contempt of Congress—a rap he takes despite being a communist of convenience, so as to aid his movie career, rather than of conviction—and tries to reconnect with his 10-year-old son. “The Quietest Man” centers on a Czech dissenter and émigré-turned–American professor who, a quarter-century after his departure from Prague and nearly as long after a divorce brought on by his selfishness, is terrified that his semi-estranged daughter, a playwright, has written a scarcely veiled indictment of his failures and inattentions. The harrowing and poignant “My Grandmother Tells Me This Story” depicts a ragtag band of World War II teen guerrillas who call themselves the Yiddish Underground. Antopol offers complex, psychologically subtle portraits of her often regretful characters, and the details—child revolutionaries carrying sharpened branches through Eastern European forests during WWII since, at a distance, they can pass for rifles or Czech dissidents who must compose their plaints against the government longhand since “the government had a record of everyone who owned typewriters”—are chilling and persuasive.
A smart, empathetic, well-crafted first collection—Antopol is a writer to watch.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-393-24113-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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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