A varied but consistently satisfying sampler of emerging artists.
Mukana Press collects a dozen stories by contemporary African writers in this new anthology.
Some of these 12 stories effectively address the shifting natures of identity and understanding across cultures; for example, a maid competes with her wealthy employer for the affection of the rich woman’s baby (who calls the maid “mama”) in “Black Paw Paw” by Obinna Ezeodili. Others play with their characters’ (and readers’) perceptions in order to reveal the deeper tensions of modern life. In the title story by Husnah Mad-hy, for example, a woman with a passion for people-watching becomes entranced by a couple in the house opposite hers, who present a vision of marriage that is much more appealing than the traditional one to which she feels resigned: “She could see the outline of their bodies as they connected, as she danced for him, as he placed kisses all over her, white teeth glistening in the dark; the sound of old Taarab music, a cacophony of drums, violins, Oud guitar, and other Swahili instruments, would drift into her room.” Unsurprisingly, the marriage turns out to be less romantic than it appears. These and other tales are uniformly lean and precise, and the prose is exuberant or mordant, depending on the story. Some manage both registers at the same time, including the final work, Victor Ehikhamenor’s “A Letter From Ireland,” in which a boy takes his grandmother—who’s been suffering from nightmares—to visit a village physician to learn the fate of her son, the boy’s uncle, in distant Dublin: “I readied my pen and paper to write down the prophecy of the gods as revealed to the native doctor. The old man was the privileged intermediary between the gods, my grandmother, and Uncle Sunday in faraway Ireland.” By the end, readers will come away anxious to see more from these authors.
A varied but consistently satisfying sampler of emerging artists.Pub Date: July 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-578-29798-9
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Mukana Press
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.
A grandmaster of the hard-boiled crime genre shifts gears to spin bittersweet and, at times, bizarre tales about bruised, sensitive souls in love and trouble.
In one of the 17 stories that make up this collection, a supporting character says: “People are so afraid of dying that they don’t even live the little bit of life they have.” She casually drops this gnomic observation as a way of breaking down a lead character’s resistance to smoking a cigarette. But her aphorism could apply to almost all the eponymous awkward Black men examined with dry wit and deep empathy by the versatile and prolific Mosley, who takes one of his occasional departures from detective fiction to illuminate the many ways Black men confound society’s expectations and even perplex themselves. There is, for instance, Rufus Coombs, the mailroom messenger in “Pet Fly,” who connects more easily with household pests than he does with the women who work in his building. Or Albert Roundhouse, of “Almost Alyce,” who loses the love of his life and falls into a welter of alcohol, vagrancy, and, ultimately, enlightenment. Perhaps most alienated of all is Michael Trey in “Between Storms,” who locks himself in his New York City apartment after being traumatized by a major storm and finds himself taken by the outside world as a prophet—not of doom, but, maybe, peace? Not all these awkward types are hapless or benign: The short, shy surgeon in “Cut, Cut, Cut” turns out to be something like a mad scientist out of H.G. Wells while “Showdown on the Hudson” is a saga about an authentic Black cowboy from Texas who’s not exactly a perfect fit for New York City but is soon compelled to do the right thing, Western-style. The tough-minded and tenderly observant Mosley style remains constant throughout these stories even as they display varied approaches from the gothic to the surreal.
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4956-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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