Razor-sharp and as caustic as acid, Kohler’s portraits of the vanity of human wishes could strip the paint off a barn.
A dozen stories by South African–born Kohler (Children of Pithiviers, 2001, etc.), set in a variety of locales from Europe to America to South Africa.
The characters here tend to be fragile, exquisite, mournful, and vaguely haunted. They are rarely what anyone would call happy, lucky or blessed, and they usually appear most satisfied with themselves when they’ve inflicted some tremendous pain on a close relative or friend. In “Casualty,” for example, an upper-class Frenchwoman avenges herself on her adulterous husband by taking a lover of her own—with near-tragic consequences for her child. “Underworld,” set in a posh South African boarding school, portrays a young girl trapped by the hypocrisy of the institution, where she is kept at school over the holidays as a punishment for some petty misbehavior—only to be molested by one of the teachers. The two older, aristocratic ladies of “Death in Rome,” who meet after many years apart for a reunion of their friendship, turn out to be well-bred vipers intent on vengeance for unforgiven slights from years gone by—just as the polite South African doctor in “Baboons” confesses one of his indiscretions to his wife out of sheer cruelty rather than guilt or remorse. It’s not a very nice crowd to run with: These are the sorts of people who plot adultery on the night before they get married (“Paris at Night”), hire prostitutes to manipulate their children (“Lunch With Mother”), and send out coy letters to potential lovers (“Rain Check”) the way most people send out résumés. They make amusing company, provided you don’t have to know them in real life.
Razor-sharp and as caustic as acid, Kohler’s portraits of the vanity of human wishes could strip the paint off a barn.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2003
ISBN: 0-86538-110-0
Page Count: 150
Publisher: Ontario Review
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003
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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