Goes off like an ammo dump.
Sequel to Coonts’s giant editorial effort Combat (2001), which featured ten original long works of military/technothriller fiction. Victory, with many of the same authors, does much the same for WWII, although none of its ten authors fought in that conflict, and few, aside from Harold Robbins, were even born (Coonts was born in 1946).
Harold Robbins? Amazingly, even with four postmortal novels having sprung from his pen, still more has been found, this time a short one, “Blood Bond,” which he apparently wrote during the war or just afterward. It tells of a German-speaking Jewish bigmouth in the OSS whose golden locks help him masquerade in Germany as an SS captain in the black uniform of the Master Race. Coonts himself, a former Air Force pilot, leads off the sheaf with “The Sea Witch,” about a dive-bomber pilot who has three bombers shot out from under him by the Japanese and so is transferred to a Black Cat squadron on New Guinea and winds up downed by a Zero and stranded on an island. The prolific Harold Coyle shows up with “Breakthrough on Bloody Ridge,” a tale about Marines making the first amphibious assault of the war and hitting the beach on what comes to be known as Starvation Island. As with his More Than Courage (see below), Coyle focuses on men with the courage and will to go eye-to-eye with the enemy, especially on a barren spine of land called Bloody Ridge. In R.J. Pineiro’s immensely exciting “The Eagle and the Cross,” a surreal madness sweeps Russian defenses that find themselves bombed and then invaded by German panzers: the Nazis have broken their nonaggression pact! As Coonts makes clear in his introduction, “Only in fiction can the essence of the human experience of war be laid bare . . . . Only through fiction can we prepare ourselves for the trial by fire, when it comes.”
Goes off like an ammo dump.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-87462-6
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2003
Six short stories from Japan's popular literary star (N.P., 1994, etc.) offer pallid bromides, blending postmodern cool with superficial explorations of ``time, healing, karma, and fate.'' Products of an affluent society that has embraced the West but not forgotten its fundamental traditions, the characters are uncertain of the future, skeptical of materialism, yearning to end the anomie and existential pain they feel. In ``Lizard,'' the title and most notable story, a doctor who works with emotionally disturbed children loves a young woman in whose reptile eyes ``I see my own lonely face, peering down, looking for something to love and cherish.'' Haunted by a brutal attack she witnessed as a child, Lizard has become an acupuncture practitioner dedicated to healing those in pain, but she cannot forget her past; only a confession of a similar painful memory from her lover offers them both solace. The protagonist of ``Blood and Water'' leaves the religious commune she was raised in, but finds that, troubled by ``the sorrow that clings to life,'' she can only be comforted by her lover's ``tough resilience.'' Other stories describe a date in an empty restaurant that helps a writer and his girlfriend understand that, though the way they think may be completely different, they are the ``archetypal couple'' whose relationship is the ``dance of two souls resonating like the twist of DNA'' (``Helix''); a man's encounter on a train with a stranger who reveals to him a universal life force that encompasses even ``the slight feeling of alienation'' he experiences in his marriage (``Newly-Wed''); a young wife's liberating realization that her marriage is secure (``Kimchee''); and the revelation of a family secret that offers hope to a woman with a sexual past (``A Strange Tale from Down by the River''). In general, the stories are too slender to support Yoshimoto's attempts to detail spiritual awakenings. As insubstantial as sushi without the fish. (First printing of 75,000)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8021-1564-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
One narrative of cultural history runs like this: As contributions to 20th-century high modernism, the English-speaking world gave us Joyce; the French gave us Proust; and the Germans gave us Hitler. Of course, the Germans also gave us Mann and Musil, but they don't count, being eminently more comprehensible to most people than either Joyce or Proust. Dalkey Archive, courageously committing to four volumes of Arno Schmidt's fiction, is positioning Schmidt (191479; Scenes from the Life of a Faun, 1982, etc.) as Germany's voice of high modernism, albeit a late arriver to the scene, detained by the Nazis' desecration of the German language. The works in this volume, beginning with ``Enthymesis'' and ending with ``Republica Intelligentsia,'' were written between 1949 and 1957. Schmidt's writing often echoes Proust's hysterical empiricism or Joyce's manic wordplay, at times rivaling even Finnegan's Wake in obscurity. Award-winning translator Woods calls Schmidt ``a recluse, a solipsist.'' Indeed, he seems to have taken Stephen Dedalus's comment that ``history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake'' literally. Schmidt's writing—described by Woods as ``spoken in both gamy vernaculars and cryptogrammatic tongues, punctuated by great rumbles of scathing rage and whoops of bawdy laughter''—is a furious attempt to write his way out of that nightmare.
Pub Date: Dec. 5, 1994
ISBN: 1-56478-066-X
Page Count: 429
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1994
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