The consequences of failed dreams movingly delineated—in this collection of four novellas by Israeli writer Katzir, now making her American debut. The protagonists are all Israeli young women, who narrate their tales of loss and despair in lyrical almost incantatory prose, fleshed out here and there with a bit of surrealism. In ``Schlaffstunde,'' a woman attending a family funeral sees a cousin, with whom in their childhood games she discovered sex and love one long-ago summer ``when the world was all gold and everything was possible and everything was about to happen.'' Their solemn but improvised ``play'' marriage and first night had been interrupted, and their grandmother's death shortly thereafter ended their summers together—but she has never forgotten their pledges of love, nor what she felt for him. The narrator of ``Fellini's Shoes'' is a young, kindhearted waitress who—dreaming of being discovered—is briefly caught up in the unrealistic ambitions of an aging director who claims to be wearing the shoes Fellini once gave him. Sitting in the recovery room of a hospital, where her mother is a patient, a daughter poignantly recalls (in ``Disneyel'') her childhood, which had been shaped by the visits of Michael, the handsome and ebullient businessman her mother had loved, and she had also adored. The last piece, ``Closing the Sea,'' is the restrained but very moving story, told with perfect pitch, of a lonely 30-ish schoolteacher who takes the day off to see an old childhood friend, and finds that even her modest expectations of pleasure are doomed. At times the women's voices and their plights blur—all have been disappointed in one way or another—but Katzir's distinctive prose and fresh ways of telling more than compensate. A notable debut.
Pub Date: May 15, 1992
ISBN: 0-15-118200-0
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1992
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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