The infinite and the ineffable, portrayed with singular wit and charm.
Universal mysteries and the legacy of world war are imaginatively transfigured in this beguiling collection of the late (1919–87) Italian polymath’s short fiction.
The book gathers 17 stories published between 1949 and 1986 that reflect the author’s humanist viewpoint and the range of interests displayed in such classic works as The Periodic Table and Report from Auschwitz. Both the war in which Levi unhappily served and the Holocaust he survived are fictionalized in a terse vignette about an Italian partisan who finds a way to “resist” his German captors (“The Death of Marinese”) and a troubling parable (“One Night”) in which an orgy of destruction is perpetrated by “little people” who appear seemingly from nowhere. Elsewhere, unforeseen complications lurk in the innovation of a sleekly packaged killing device (“Knall”) and in the experience of workers in a paint factory (Levi himself was one) where a mixture “that provided protection from misfortune” is created (in “The Magic Paint”). Presumptions of social control are calmly skewered in an understated account of a public spectacle that offers commuted sentences to prisoners who perform as “Gladiators” combating cars, and in the tale of a nondescript clerk entrusted with recording—and arranging—other people’s deaths. There’s a hint of Borges in the description of a lavish fantasyland populated by famous literary characters (featuring such promising pairings as the Marquis de Sade’s Justine with Dracula), and one of Calvino in a fable of social unease as experienced by a kangaroo invited to a lavish “Buffet Dinner.” And the relationships between scientists’ discoveries and their own flawed perspectives and powers are brilliantly conveyed in a wry tale of embattled ethnographers in the Bolivian jungle (“The Sorcerers”) and in the radiant title story, about a fluid celestial entity that mysteriously resists both predictability and classification.
The infinite and the ineffable, portrayed with singular wit and charm.Pub Date: April 11, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-393-06468-1
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2007
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
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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