While Stamm doesn't discount the possibility of happiness and comradeship, there is invariably an ounce of joy for every...
Most of the individuals in these austerely written stories by Swiss novelist Stamm (Unformed Landscape, 2005, etc.) lead humdrum but desperate lives.
To read all 20, assembled from two volumes of stories published separately in German, is to visit a literary purgatory where a throng of dispirited characters cling to a comfortless bare rock of prose. His characters, whether Swiss or Costa Rican, visiting New York or working in London, share a world culture of Alec Guinness, Tracy Chapman, Walt Whitman and Star Trek that does nothing to bring them closer together. Many of these stories involve love that fails or a despairing plea for help or solace that goes unanswered. In “Like a Child, Like an Angel,” a wealthy Swiss accountant never responds to a letter from a poor colleague who needs an expensive medicine for his wife. In “The Wall of Fire,” an exploited outcast working for a carnival puts himself at risk to impress a girl to whom he means almost nothing. The narrator of “What We Can Do” rebuffs the embarrassed advances of a sad office mate to whom their mutual colleagues have given the cruel gift of a vibrator. “Black Ice” is perhaps the bleakest: Larissa, a young mother dying of a resistant strain of tuberculosis tells “everything she had thought in the last few months” to a journalist because no one else—not even her husband—has visited her for months. The misery radiates to the smallest details. Larissa mentions a neighbor with a broken TV “who keeps switching it on anyway and staring at the black screen.” In Stamm’s world, when three young friends laugh and sunbathe on a station platform, they do so only until a train pulls up to unload the corpse of a suppliant who has died on the way to Lourdes.
While Stamm doesn't discount the possibility of happiness and comradeship, there is invariably an ounce of joy for every pound of gloom.Pub Date: April 18, 2006
ISBN: 1-59051-169-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2006
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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
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SEEN & HEARD
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in...
Huzzah! Martin (The Ice Dragon, 2014, etc.) delivers just what fans have been waiting for: stirring tales of the founding of the Targaryen line.
Duncan—Dunk for short—has his hapless moments. He’s big, nearly gigantic, “hugely tall for his age, a shambling, shaggy, big-boned boy of sixteen or seventeen.” Uncertain of himself, clumsy, and alone in the world, he has every one of the makings of a hero, if only events will turn in that direction. They do, courtesy of a tiny boy who steals into the “hedge knight” Dunk’s life and eventually reveals a name to match that of Ser Duncan the Tall—an altogether better name, at that, than Duncan of Flea Bottom would have been. Egg, as the squire calls himself, has a strange light about him, as if he will be destined to go on to better things, as indeed he will. Reminiscent of a simpler Arthur Rackham, the illustrations capture that light, as they do the growing friendship between Dunk and Egg—think Manute Bol and Muggsy Bogues, if your knowledge of basketball matches your interest in fantasy. This being Martin, that friendship will not be without its fraught moments, its dangers and double crosses and knightly politics. There are plenty of goopily violent episodes as well, from jousts (“this time Lord Leo Tyrell aimed his point so expertly he ripped the Grey Lion’s helm cleanly off his head”) to medieval torture (“Egg…used the hat to fan away the flies. There were hundreds crawling on the dead men, and more drifting lazily through the still, hot air.”). Throughout, Martin delivers thoughtful foreshadowing of the themes and lineages that will populate his Ice and Fire series, in which Egg, it turns out, is much less fragile than he seems.
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in addition, they succeed in making fans want more—and with luck, Martin will oblige them with more of these early yarns.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53348-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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