It’s no coincidence that the epigraph of this fiction is from George Orwell, for Drakulic is similarly aware of moral...
In a series of fables set in Eastern Europe, Drakulic (Two Underdogs and a Cat: Three Reflections on Communism, 2009, etc.), a native of Croatia, explores with wit, grace and humor the collapse of communism.
The author begins her collection with the memoirs of Bohumil, a mouse now housed in a school cabinet in The Museum of Communism in Prague. The conceit of this first story is that Bohumil is leading Hans, a mouse from Würzburg, on a tour of the museum, which is full of “ugly things“ and hence a refuge from all the beautiful buildings in Prague. The museum even contains an interrogation room as an unnostalgic reminder of the recent political past. In the next story the narrator is Koki, a talking parrot who recounts his past history with Marshal Tito. Koki presents Tito not only as the establisher of a personality cult but as a dashing figure, a ladies’ man who “[exudes] charisma even when wearing shorts." The following story features Todor, a dancing bear from Bulgaria who wonders whether he’s in fact a symbol of society. (He is.) And so it goes. Other sections are narrated by a cat, a mole (who tunnels under the Berlin Wall), a pig (who notices she bears a striking resemblance to Miss Piggy), the oldest dog in Bucharest and, finally, a psychotic raven. The latter provides one of the most interesting turns in Drakulic’s fiction, for the raven has flown into a psychiatric hospital in Albania, and years later the psychiatrist who treated the raven left a journal of her notes to her son, who tries to make sense of his mother’s experience. The son believes his mother has written about Mr. Raven, as he is called, in a kind of code—that he’s not a raven at all but rather someone who entered the hospital and needed to disguise his identity.
It’s no coincidence that the epigraph of this fiction is from George Orwell, for Drakulic is similarly aware of moral failure and political excess.Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-14-311863-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2010
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
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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