An uneven collection, but the best entries are outstanding.
Five short stories set around the world, from the author of The Blue Taxi (2006).
“Pearls to Swine” is a comic gem in which a perfect snob, Celeste, vents without censure or apology. A paragon of good taste, Celeste decides that the only fixture her graciously appointed home in Spa, Belgium, lacks is a guest to appreciate it. She resolves to invite two: the daughter of a friend from New York and a young woman who has taken refuge in a local convent after getting pregnant. Neither guest follows the script their hostess has imagined for them. The convent girl is particularly disappointing. Says Celeste: “What did I expect, you ask? Someone thinner, first of all.” Celeste’s outrage is purely aesthetic: She is offended that the girl doesn’t look like a Pre-Raphaelite painting. “Wondrous Strange” is quite different but equally enjoyable. In it, an African djinn gives a middle-class, middle-aged English woman instructions for healing her husband’s strange malady. In the aforementioned stories, Köenings demonstrates an incisive yet generous understanding of human behavior that is reminiscent of A.S. Byatt and Iris Murdoch, and, like those authors, she is willing to entertain mystery without dissecting it. Occasionally though, in both “Pearls to Swine” and “Wondrous Strange,” nervous, amateurish tendencies appear, and these tendencies unfortunately dominate the collection’s other three stories. The title story is an interminable series of extravagant descriptions; “Sisters for Shama” is an elaborate concept—a storyteller conjures imaginary girls to replace a lost sibling—and not much else; “Setting Up Shop” is basically gossip arranged in the shape of short fiction. In these stories, Köenings relies heavily on exotic settings (East Africa, the Indian Ocean coast), overwrought metaphors and preciously ethnographic characters while providing little narrative substance.
An uneven collection, but the best entries are outstanding.Pub Date: March 25, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-316-00186-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Back Bay/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2008
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
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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