Well regarded in France, her native country, Bizot’s first appearance in this language is a gift to English-speaking readers.
A slim collection of stories by turns witty, mysterious, and absurd.
A young man picks up his father-in-law from the airport. Since they’ve never met, their time in the car will be the only time they ever spend together. When they get back to the 26th-floor apartment where the young man, Saez, lives with his wife, Marie, the father-in-law goes inside, and Saez goes to take care of the suitcase. The next thing Saez knows, the father-in-law has fallen out the window. Marie is out of town, incommunicado, so Saez must recruit a friend to help him pack up the body and take it back to the Armenian village from which it came. There are echoes here of As I Lay Dying, but Bizot’s story is somehow even more absurd: when they eventually arrive in the village, Saez and his friend find it empty of people. Finally, a couple shows up, but they aren’t interested in the body or its burial—or anything, really, except an alarm clock Saez gives them. The story is the strongest in Bizot’s first collection to appear in English. Bizot has a fine sense of the absurd and an even finer sense of deadpan. Story after story begins in medias res, with details about the characters, their relationships to each other, and what exactly is happening only appearing gradually—and sometimes not at all. In one, three siblings hide out in the country, working a farm they barely know how to handle. In the title story, a man watches with disapproval the gardeners who uproot his yard. Throughout the book, characters wait and wait. For the most part, there isn’t much plot. An old woman in a fine hotel describes a pair of honeymooners who claim to have seen half a dozen rats in their room. No one else has seen the rats.
Well regarded in France, her native country, Bizot’s first appearance in this language is a gift to English-speaking readers.Pub Date: June 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-944884-12-3
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Dialogos
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
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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