Moving, strange, and occasionally piercing.
Fourteen short stories about being Lao and working class in North America.
In poet Thammavongsa’s (Cluster, 2019) first collection of fiction, privilege is a concrete force, arbitrary and inexorable. Red, a woman who plucks chickens at a factory, longs for the money to get a nose job to turn hers into “a thin nose that stuck out from her face and pointed upward. Everyone who worked in the front office had that kind of nose.” When a spot in the office opens up, Red’s co-workers get nose jobs, but "none of them got the job. It was given to a girl just out of high school whose father worked in the front office.” Other stories are about the poignant need for hope when you have nothing else: In “Mani Pedi,” a failed boxer begins working at his sister’s nail salon and longs for one of his clients, a woman he calls Miss Emily. “That I can dream at all means something to me,” he tells his sister when she berates him. Many of the narrators here are children, which feels apt when the stories explore the vulnerability of being ignorant, of knowledge as a form of privilege: One narrator can’t bear to tell her father what “thief” means after he hears his co-workers spitting the word at him. In the title story, a little girl asks her father how to pronounce knife. “It’s kahneyff,” he says. But when she’s asked to read aloud in class, her teacher won’t let her continue until she pronounces the word correctly. “Finally, a yellow-haired girl in the class called out, ‘It’s knife! The k is silent,’ and rolled her eyes as if there was nothing easier in the world to know.” These stories, written in a spare, distant register, twist the heart; Thammavongsa captures in a few well-chosen words how it feels for immigrant children to protect their parents. But occasionally the stories lean on stereotype to make their point—that scornful yellow-haired girl, blue-eyed and freckled, has a mother who wears a black fur coat and heels and drives a “big shiny black” Volkswagen.
Moving, strange, and occasionally piercing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-42213-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
A first English translation of a 1989 Hungarian novel, in which the arrival of a traveling circus in a nondescript village arouses local curiosity, paranoia, and terror and ends in a kind of communal madness. Like the work of Austrian ur-pessimist Thomas Bernhard (which may have influenced it), Krasznahorkai’s darkly funny parable is presented in chapters of unbroken long paragraphs, and attains both a hurtling momentum and a pleasing complexity in the presentation of its passionately interconnected characters—the most memorable being the Valkyrie-like hausfrauen Mrs. Eszter and Mrs. Plauf, the former’s estranged husband (a music teacher who tries and fails to remain aloof from his neighbors’ fear of everything new and different), and the latter’s son Valuska, a young idealist whose “awakening” is gloomily foreordained. Not an easy read, but ingeniously composed and fascinating.
Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2000
ISBN: 0-7043-8009-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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