Fiction more skillful than memorable.
Five longish, often familiar, but always readable stories by Freudenberger—like Jonathan Safran Foer, a New Yorker discovery in its Summer 2001 Debut Fiction issue.
In the title piece (reprinted from that New Yorker issue), an American girl who paints has an affair with a native Delhi man. When he unexpectedly dies, she’s left in a kind of limbo, half-looked-after by the dead man’s imperious mother, but not really belonging any longer in Delhi—a fact made cruelly obvious when the dead lover’s widow says to her one day, “I have my sons. . . . And you have no one.” Longer, looser, and less successful is “The Orphan.” An American girl calls home from Bangkok to tell her mother she’s been raped by her Thai boyfriend. Result? Meek and wan mother, cold and pompous lawyer father, and college-age brother descend upon her in a “rescue” attempt. All four are spoiled, they fight and nip among themselves, not one is appealing in the least way—and the story’s symbols labor against what’s asked of them. Altogether more successful—and the best here—is “Outside the Eastern Gate,” about another American girl, this one scarred by her poetically (and carelessly) flamboyant mother’s abandonment of her—in more than one way. At age 40, the girl returns to her father in his expatriate home in India, where the past crumbles, just as does her father’s mind under Alzheimer’s. Equally good in its details but much less commanding in it subject is “The Tutor.” The American girl lives in Bombay this time, with her divorced father (the mother went back to the US), attending American school and acting like—oy, like a teenager. It’s SAT time: she’s good in the math but needs work with the verbal, gets a tutor who went to Harvard—and manages to lose her virginity to him. Longest and most strained for its effect is “Letter from the Last Bastian,” about a Vietnam-era novelist and the girl of 17 who’s writing this long letter about him—and her.
Fiction more skillful than memorable.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-008879-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2003
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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