Extremely well-executed (so to speak), but it still seems more like a stunt than an artistically necessary stratagem.
Decapitated heads give us their final thoughts in 62 very short stories from Pulitzer Prize–winner Butler (Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, 1992, etc.).
The author’s previous collection, Had a Good Time (2004), also had an overarching premise, but inventing the life experiences behind postcard texts isn’t nearly as bizarre as his launching pad here. Two opening quotes inform us that a severed head retains consciousness for 90 seconds after it’s severed, and that “in a heightened state of emotion, we speak at the rate of 160 words per minute.” So each of these monologues, most by historical figures, contains 240 words, not a lot in which to capture the essence of someone’s existence. Still, the ever-ingenious Butler manages to create some haunting moments as he moves through time from a hunter beheaded by a saber-toothed tiger in 40,000 b.c. through his own imagined demise in 2008 (decapitated by an elevator door, it appears). A 19th-century French criminal seems to almost welcome the guillotine’s “ferocious embrace” in his frighteningly erotic musings. A Chinese wife crippled by foot-binding cries, “please, before my head, cut off my feet.” A baroness killed on Hitler’s orders nostalgically recalls the decadent pleasures of Weimar Germany and sees her executioner dressed in white tie and tails, just like the emcee in Cabaret. Several creepy entries are reminiscent of the style of murder Middle Eastern terrorists prefer for dispatching their hostages (mercifully, Daniel Pearl is not among them), and the thoughts of a Muslim woman beheaded by fatwa powerfully evoke her imprisonment behind the veil. But the primary emphasis here is existential rather than political; people remember the caress of a mother or a lover, the joys or traumas from which they have just been finally separated. Thematic unity is the only thing missing: The volume as a whole doesn’t cohere into anything more significant than the sum of its oddly beautiful parts.
Extremely well-executed (so to speak), but it still seems more like a stunt than an artistically necessary stratagem.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-8118-5614-3
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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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