An assemblage of both gauzy and substantial stories from an unquestionably imaginative author.
A dark and dreamy collection by Schweblin (Fever Dream, 2017), like an eerie walk through a perpetual twilight of uneasy—and often absurdly funny—states of consciousness and being.
In these 20 swiftly running stories, unimpeachably translated from Spanish by McDowell, Schweblin explores the slippery terrain of the mind's deeper recesses, where anxieties over the limits, or lack thereof, of the possible multiply and mutate. The collection’s trenchant first story, “Headlights,” begins with a bride realizing she’s been abandoned on the side of a highway by her new husband after stopping for a bathroom break, ostensibly because she took too long and “waiting wears [men] out.” Here she encounters a field full of jilted, wailing, and vengeful fellow brides in a witty examination of gender allegiances and competition, and dependency and tolerance in romantic relationships. “Preserves” introduces a pregnant woman and her husband who are both unprepared for the rigors of parenthood; they take drastic measures to eliminate the pregnancy but somehow preserve their would-be daughter for when they're ready. In the title story, the limitlessness and obligations of parental love are put to the test by a teenage daughter's curious appetites. And in "Toward a Happy Civilization," in a clever dilation of the idea of never being content where one is, an office worker from the capital plots his escape from the countryside, where he's being held captive by a train station attendant and his wife, who cooks wholesome meals and assigns daily tasks of vigorous outdoor labor to the man and their other office-worker detainees. Though some stories are more desultory than others and may not entirely satisfy, at her best, Schweblin builds dense and uncanny worlds, probing the psychology of human relationships and the ways we perceive existence and interpret culture, with dark humor and sharp teeth.
An assemblage of both gauzy and substantial stories from an unquestionably imaginative author.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-399-18462-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
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
SEEN & HEARD
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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