Offers rewarding insights to those willing to wade through her often idiosyncratic presentation.
This quirky book of 20 brief essays explores various issues of modern life from a humanist perspective.
Menon’s (Women, Wellbeing, and the Ethics of Domesticity in an Odia Hindu Temple Town, 2013, etc.) collection of meditations, stories, and playful writing exercises defies easy genre categorization. The first essay, “My Mind and Me,” introduces the volume with an inner dialogue between a chronic multitasker and a mind that longs for peaceful contemplation. Several of Menon’s thought pieces expand on similar themes, such as “Rachel - No More a Mystery,” a profile of the evolution of an empath, deeply sensitive to the world’s pain, who turns out to be the author herself. “Jouska” demonstrates the value of imagined dialogue to improve relationships and increase inner awareness. Other chapters read like short stories, such as “Scarred,” a touching, straightforward narrative written from the point of view of Salma, a young girl forced into marriage with an angry, abusive man who eventually throws acid on her, permanently disfiguring her but not destroying her courage and determination. “A Rendezvous/One-Night Stand” plays with words with childlike delight as it describes the heroine’s sensuous abandon to a tryst with her inner writer: “A farrago of thoughts it had been. Or gallimaufry. Call it a ragbag, if you will….Even the probability of probability was welcome.” Not all of Menon’s inner explorations are successful. In “Dear Straight People,” a well-meaning defense of society’s outliers, she makes a potentially offensive comparison of sexual and gender minorities to those with “any other physical handicap.” Some of her writing is distractingly abstruse. For example, the introduction to “Gods! Are you Listening?” states, “It is always better to be safe than sorry. Well, that is a precursor for the anticipatory bail that I seek from the readers who are staunch believers of God.” However, that essay winds around to this canny observation, “Religion, per se, was not created by man to destroy life but to perpetuate the right way of living. In fact, it is a code of conduct for life in the manner appropriate for each culture.”
Offers rewarding insights to those willing to wade through her often idiosyncratic presentation.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5437-4289-3
Page Count: 108
Publisher: PartridgeSingapore
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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