A short, quirky and sometimes-compelling book from the author of The Flamethrowers (2013).
Three offbeat tales that border on the surreal yet are curiously (and paradoxically) anchored in a version of historical reality.
In the first story, “The Great Exception,” an unnamed admiral tells a queen he believes the Earth is pear-shaped rather than round and requests money to allow him to fulfill his vision of exploration. This she grants him, though his voyage concludes with the natives of “Kuba” cooking and eating him. (First, however, they sever his toes so he can't “tromp inland and subjugate the island.”) While awaiting word of the disposition of the admiral’s voyage, the queen pines for him with an intensity bordering on the sexual. In “Debouchment,” despite a woman’s disclaimer that life on an island (also reminiscent of Cuba) is not especially violent, a faith healer provides hope to the people in his illegal radio broadcasts—all this in a landscape where there are “humans hanging in the trees beyond the security fence.” The final story is the most complex and subtle, and it gives the collection its title. The action unfolds explicitly in Havana in 1952 against a backdrop of Batista's rise to power; it focuses on the mysterious Rachel K, a “zazou” dancer from Paris who entertains (in all senses) her male audience and particularly gets the attention of Christian de la Mazière, a French Nazi now living on the island after having been sentenced to five years in a rather cushy prison.
A short, quirky and sometimes-compelling book from the author of The Flamethrowers (2013).Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2421-5
Page Count: 96
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
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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