Grim, haunting reading.
Austere but beautifully written tales of self-destruction, paranoia and death.
Irish novelist Wall (Alice Falling, 2000, etc.) seems most comfortable in the longer story format, where characters can unfold—and relationships can break down—at a leisurely pace. One of the best in the collection is “The Bestiary,” a harrowing, Poe-like tale of the growing madness of Tom Ryan, a mild-mannered professor “assailed by the knowledge of his own inadequacy.” He becomes obsessed with an earthy, uninhibited student who challenges him in his arcane subject area of gardeners and bestiaries, signs and portents. Literature must be “about something,” she claims; “You’ve lost me,” Ryan responds. His behavior grows increasingly aberrant, his lectures increasingly incoherent; Wall saves his climax for the final chilling sentence. Another strong piece, “In Xanadu,” focuses on a set of love relationships, brilliantly (and somewhat coldly) dissecting the affinity for both men and women of audacious and unrepressed Nuala, the tale’s most memorable character. “Surrender” spotlights Jim Henchion, a tormented translator whose brilliant new rendering of Dante’s Inferno seems destined to remain incomplete due to his awareness that “the closer you get [in translation], the more you realize that the gap between you and the work is unbridgeable.” Some stories are very short indeed, with little wiggle room for the interplay between characters, and one (“The William Walls”) is a bagatelle that traces the histories of some of the author’s namesakes. Wall frequently experiments with form, switching narrators several times within a story, for example, to give the reader multiple perspectives on the action. In “Nero Was an Angler,” he even allows the narrative to double back on itself so that dialogue from the beginning is repeated toward the end—but in a very different context.
Grim, haunting reading.Pub Date: Dec. 12, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-86322-355-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Dufour
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2007
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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