Freund does a remarkable job of telling his “Tales” from the perspective of a countryman who understands that memories are...
Freund (West of West End, 2008, etc.) pens a suspenseful collection of short stories about Romanian Jews as they lived before, during and after the Holocaust, bringing to life two-faced converts to Christianity, Swiss money-launderers and voluptuous enchantresses.
Fans of Eastern European history, Jewish literature and World War II remembrances will thoroughly enjoy Freund’s rich, unique characters, unpredictable storylines and well-deserved rewards. Freund is skilled at writing about his homeland, Romania, where he lived through student rebellions and the experience of being placed in front of a firing squad. In his second collection of short stories about Eastern Europe, Freund takes readers on a century-long journey with the stories roughly arranged in chronological order. He begins with a description of an alderman who lived in the late 1890s and ends with the thoughts of a treasure hunter who visits post-Communist Romania. Freund’s most daring venture, “Rational Expectations,” is about a reunion between old acquaintances and lovers; the author skillfully relates past and present events, including a passionate encounter in a pharmacy backroom, from multiple points of view. At times, Freund floods the text with too many historical details, and several stories—particularly “Koloman’s Cross”—read as tedious morality plays. But Freund rescues his work by injecting a playful spirit into his characters. In “Feeding the Piranhas,” two Romanian Jews make a business of booking tickets to Rio for German Nazis desperate to leave Portugal, and the price is always at least one suitcase of German stocks. After the war is over, the partners realize they have “to find a place with a proper appreciation of the virtues of both cleanliness and discretion.” They simultaneously arrive at the same conclusion: “Almost in unison we shouted out ‘Switzerland.’” Overall, the author presents a well-crafted, thoughtful commentary on corruption, anti-Semitism, love and secrecy.
Freund does a remarkable job of telling his “Tales” from the perspective of a countryman who understands that memories are sweeter in exile.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2012
ISBN: 978-1468040388
Page Count: 168
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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