Stylish, sincere tales that go to dark, sometimes-uncomfortable places.
In Ortega-Medina’s debut short story collection, characters are consumed by their fascinations with sex, death, and inescapable fate.
The unnamed Japanese narrator in the opening story, “Torture by Roses,” takes a job working for millionaire Ikeda Yataro in Tokyo. All he has to do to become Ikeda’s heir is deliver meals and correspondence. But what Ikeda takes from the narrator is far greater: he wants to teach him how to hate, which would, for starters, entail calling off his engagement with his fiancee. The narrator, who’s told to ask no questions, is a prisoner of sorts, which makes him akin to other characters throughout the book. In “Cactuses,” for example, an aspiring writer meets an older, well-known author who’s resigned to his inevitable, imminent death: “I just know,” he tells the young man, that it will happen soon. In “Star Party,” a man named Isaac is granted temporary asylum in the United States and can’t leave the country until his case is decided, and in “And a Little Child Shall Lead Them,” Sadie Hunter, a battered woman, gets no help from her mother or a priest. Ortega-Medina’s tales are predominantly somber and often dabble in the macabre, as when lonely Susan Foltz, in “After the Storm,” finds a dead body on the beach and drags it back to her lighthouse home. In “Invitation to the Dominant Culture,” a man named Guillermo Fausto Perez III discovers sex as well as a disturbing, kinky side of his personality. There’s definitely poignancy in these stories, however, as characters search for identity, be it religious or sexual; for example, Marc Sadot, in the two-part story “An Israel State of Mind,” hopes that his Israel trip will help him in “ridding himself” of his desires, but instead it reunites him with the man he loves. The surprisingly amusing “The Shovelist” is a bright spot among gloomier themes, as new neighbors Jake and Ronny find it difficult to say no to elderly Guillaume’s offer to be their snow-shoveler. Ortega-Medina’s prose is elegant and potent throughout, with visceral passages bathed in lyricism: “Down below, the ocean continued to vomit forth waves of foam and debris on to the beach.”
Stylish, sincere tales that go to dark, sometimes-uncomfortable places.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5262-0253-6
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Cloud Lodge Books
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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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