Companion volume to Jones's Saga of a Wayward Sailor (1979) and not a continuation of this season's To Venture Further (p. 1062). Saga was a song of love for women of the sea, while this self- styled work of ``fictionalized fact''—written in 1979 and displaying the author at his verbal richest—is a paean to the misfits who found refuge in Jones's company. We meet Jones in a downpour, aboard his ketch Cresswell, with his 170-pound British mate, Cecilia (``Sissie'') St. John—the Bishop of Southchester's sister—and his three-legged, one-eyed dog, Nelson. When St. John falls into the noisome harbor while helping a catamaran tie up, Jones turns ``to see poor Sissie's yellow oilskin jacket just below the oily, slimy surface, rising to float, flailing, in the muck- bestrewn, turd-flotilla'd, dog-corpse-littered waters of Ibiza Harbor.'' And so it goes, with Jones and St. John under dirty weather of gold-lined clouds. Their first big adventure is being hired to deliver a fancy yacht from Algiers to Marseilles. Once aboard, Jones finds that the owner is apparently an anti-Algerian terrorist and that his steel-hulled yacht must sail without papers, in the dead of night. They leave in a hail of bullets, chased by an Algerian gunboat. Eventually, Jones locks the owner below deck and gets away in a launch while the gunboat captures the terrorist. Enter St. John's loud-chortling brother, Bishop Willie, and millionaire ``art collector'' Elmyr Dore-Boutin, who shows Jones his huge cache of original Picassos, Dalis, Dufys and Renoirs- -though at book's end Jones visits Dore-Boutin in his tastefully appointed Ibizan jail cell and drinks his champagne: Dore-Boutin is actually the world's greatest forger. Good dialogue and great Jonesian prose, so dense you can walk on it and watch your tracks fill up with sea water.
Pub Date: Dec. 6, 1991
ISBN: 0-924486-17-1
Page Count: 312
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
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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