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THE PERV

STORIES

A first collection of loosely related stories and a title novella, from the Lebanese-born author of Koolaids (1998). The seven briefer stories, which seem to be partially autobiographical, depict—usually in discrete fragments arranged in nonsequential paragraphs—the experience of growing up in a volatile country with extreme social and ethnic contrasts and riven by civil war; and the experience of various “escapes” from parental expectations as well as more immediate dangers. The typical protagonist here is a sensitive outsider lost in the world of books and enduring complex relationships with such imposing loved ones as “My Grandmother, the Grandmaster” (a story where a chess match assumes clever symbolic importance) or with a once-beloved cousin (“Remembering Nasser”) who disapproved of his homosexuality. Sexual confusion and guilt are paramount in several pieces (“Duck” and “A Flight to Paris”) that mourn the loss of a lover to AIDS, and especially in “The Changing Room,” a tense account of a wary Lebanese boy’s experiences in an English boarding school. The centerpiece—and most troubling story here—is The Perv, a self-justifying pedophile’s nauseatingly explicit account of his correspondence with a nubile (Lebanese-American) boy enjoyably exploring his own gayness. Or is this only the fantasy of an aging recluse (who may be a patient in a hospital or sanatorium), comforting and exciting himself with the particulars of imaginary passions (“I have always been someone else, always”)? Alameddine skillfully juggles several possibilities in a deeply confrontational fiction that hauls the reader headlong into intimate contact with a defiantly unconventional sensibility. Despite some monotony, this is a vivid and interesting further exploration of Alameddine’s uniquely multinational, multisexual fiction. It’s not a likable book, but it’s one that the reader does come to respect.

Pub Date: July 13, 1999

ISBN: 0-312-20041-2

Page Count: 208

Publisher: Picador

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1999

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THE THINGS THEY CARRIED

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

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SIGHTSEEING

STORIES

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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