Amiable manifestations of the bard’s life and times, though without the sheer driving éclat of, say, last year’s Mrs....
Berkman debuts with ten pleasant albeit airy historicals about episodes in Shakespeare’s life or characters in his plays.
At age 11, in “Gold,” Shakespeare declares to his mother that he won’t follow in his father’s footsteps as a glover, but instead—somehow—will earn great riches. And “In the Bed,” presumably Anne Hathaway’s second-best, his plan is formed; there is happy lovemaking between husband and wife before Shakespeare’s departure for London (“I believe I can be effective, writing for the theater,” he says in one of the moments of particular heavy-handedness that are sprinkled throughout), though in the same bed there’s also grief when son Hamnet dies of fever. In his mean lodgings in London, Shakespeare works on A Midsummer Night’s Dream as the fairy-queen Titania hovers over his shoulder commenting—and objecting that she’s made to love an ass. Though monologues by Ophelia (“Dark Blue”), Lady Macbeth (“The Scottish Wife”), and Juliet’s love-denied mother (“Duty”) have their own sorts of interest, they satisfy less than do the sketches offering fictional peeks into the life of Shakespeare himself. These are more abundantly provided in “Jennet,” where the author sires an illegitimate son, and in “Mary Mountjoy’s Dowry,” about life in the working-class London house where the great man boards—a piece that includes extensive diary-entries from the period. “No Cause” is among the most ambitious here, having to do with the marriages of Shakespeare’s daughters, especially plain Judith, who at 30 feels compelled to settle for an especially humiliating offer, her only one. Best of all and most deft with its learning may be the last, when Shakespeare dies in the large kitchen at New Place (the kitchen is where it’s warmest), thinking of Elizabeth I, in “Diamonds at Her Fingertips.”
Amiable manifestations of the bard’s life and times, though without the sheer driving éclat of, say, last year’s Mrs. Shakespeare, The Complete Works, by Robert Nye.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-1255-X
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
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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