A fine collection that manages to re-create a distant and exotic world, from a writer who deserves to be better known in...
Eight stories by celebrated Indonesian novelist Toer (The Girl From the Coast, 2002, etc.), most of them fictionalized memoirs of his childhood and youth.
Born in 1925, the son of a nationalist schoolmaster in East Java, the author grew up in a home that was a center of the nascent anticolonialist movement. The characters here, very obviously modeled closely on his relatives and himself, are educated, provincial Indonesians who move somewhat awkwardly between, on the one hand, the traditions of Islam and village life and, on the other, the modern consciousness that underlay the development of Indonesian nationalism. The title story features a young boy’s impressionistic recollections of his childhood home: his schoolmaster father participates in the nationalist movement and is often away for long periods of time; his long-suffering and devout Muslim mother suffers from her husband’s neglect but endures nonetheless. “In Twilight Born” continues the saga, describing the turmoil that is wrought when a local teacher makes his home into a center of anticolonial activity and nearly has his school shut down by the authorities in consequence. “Circumcision” offers an unusually nostalgic view of Islam from the perspective of an 11-year-old boy who recalls his circumcision and the celebrations that followed. “Inem” counters with a sad account of a poor servant girl forced into an arranged marriage at the age of eight. Family life is Toer’s dominant theme here, but he can turn his attention outward as well. “Revenge” depicts a young private in the nationalist forces who must look the other way when he witnesses one of his officers torturing a captured soldier, and “Independence Day” portrays the quiet shame of a blind and crippled hero of the war of independence who comes to resent being looked after by his wealthy family.
A fine collection that manages to re-create a distant and exotic world, from a writer who deserves to be better known in this country.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2004
ISBN: 1-4013-6663-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2003
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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