Visual and vibrant. Literary and lyrical.
Seven stories populate award-winning English novelist (How to Paint a Dead Man, 2009, etc.) Hall’s first collection.
“Butcher’s Perfume” is set up against the Scottish border, “burnt farm, red-river, raping territory,” where motherless Kathleen falls in with the Slessors, a prosperous family with a “gipsy” mother. Intrigued by petite and blue-eyed, hard-bitten and combative Manda, Kathleen soon needs help from a brother, Aaron, who rights a wrong with a brutal fierceness. In the title story, an older-woman–younger-man couple meet for a tryst. The man is a doctor-in-training, and there are intimations the woman is mortally ill. Next comes “Bees,” rendered in second person. A woman, disgraced by her husband’s illegitimate child, leaves her beloved northland's “great heathered fells” to seek refuge with a London friend, lingering there unemployed, unemployable, contemplating a garden filled with dead bees. In “The Agency,” a comfortable life, thriving children and a professorial husband are risked by a woman after a sophisticated friend introduces her to an elegant service willing to provide a companion “to meet all possible needs.” Lovers take a vacation to an isolated African resort in “She Murdered the Mortal He.” There is a fracture in the relationship, and frustrated, she walks to a nearby village, glimpsing “in a clean bolt of panic,” a white shape trailing her. It is but a dog, a beast that later returns with a bloodied muzzle. Most affecting is “The Nightlong River,” a story of north country girls shortly after the Great War. The land has been seized by winter so cold as to be an “inverse Eden.” Magda is ill. Dolly attempts to help, learning in the end the dead leave us in “the solid world upon which we find ourselves, and in which we reign.” The collection concludes with “Vuotjärvi.” A couple vacation at a remote Finnish lake, and on an idyllic summer outing, the man attempts to swim to an island and disappears.
Visual and vibrant. Literary and lyrical.Pub Date: Jan. 29, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-220845-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2012
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
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