Samson’s new stories are warm and engaging, but some falter on their own affected charm.
A cycle of intersecting stories describes the lives that make up an English seaside community—their joys, regrets, and various embarrassments.
Samson is gifted in her understanding of and patience for the variety of human experience. In these stories, a piano tuner regrets his untapped talent as a musician; a mother worries that she doesn’t love her baby as she should; a young girl tries to get to know her long-lost father and finds herself saddened and exasperated by him at the same time that she's eager for his attention. These characters are all loosely connected to each other. The young mother has a sister who later becomes the piano tuner’s lover. The piano tuner’s former teacher is the mother of the fatherless girl. This strategy allows Samson to draw for her readers the outline of an entire community. We see how each character affects the others, for good and for bad. Though these characters are stationed in a small seaside town, they aren’t trapped there, and the scope of the book widens to encompass mainland Europe. A concert pianist considers her Jewish grandmother’s flight from Hamburg as she herself leaves the city after a performance. Another story describes the struggle by inhabitants of Soviet-occupied Poland to build a church. Samson’s prose, whatever her topic, is elegant and warm. She has a lyrical touch and a fine eye for detail. Unfortunately, she also has a penchant for preciousness which, when indulged, can be cloying. In her final story, a woman converses with her beloved cat, and the cat, in complete sentences and formal syntax, converses back. Other stories, too, border on cute in their overly tidy resolutions. Samson’s benevolence, though, and the good-heartedness of her observations, makes up for those too-sweet moments.
Samson’s new stories are warm and engaging, but some falter on their own affected charm.Pub Date: March 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63286-549-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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