Earthy, spare stories that paint a bleak portrait of human shortcomings.
Thirteen short stories by a Thai writer making her English debut examine life under the strictures of capitalism and rigid gender roles.
In these stories, published in Thailand from 1995 to 2014, villagers, prostitutes, and wage workers struggle with the impossibility of their dreams in lives marked by drudgery. In “The Attendant,” an elevator operator thinks wistfully of a youth spent hauling cassava roots on a farm, in stark contrast to the atomized work his body does now, operating a deadening piece of machinery shaped like a coffin. In “The Awaiter,” the title character is unemployed, aimless, and hoping for human connection when he finds money next to a bus stop and waits for someone to come back for it. Those who hope for a glamorous rise to the top end up reflecting bitterly on their choices: In “The Second Book,” Boonsong becomes a promising politician thanks to his connections to a powerful kingpin; when that kingpin is killed, Boonsong’s hopes—both his political ambitions and, eventually, even his childhood dreams—are summarily dashed. And in “Within These Walls,” a politician's wife realizes, as her grievously injured husband lies in the hospital, that her life has been entirely defined by his choices. Because these characters are trapped, either by their circumstances or by their own obsessive thought processes, the prose is rife with repetition, an effective narrative strategy that can also become frustrating: “I was the one suffering from having to lay hands on it. Isn’t it twisted? When I hurt others, I’m the one that suffers; when others hurt me, I’m the one that suffers again.” Several of the stories are told with heavy irony from the perspectives of blinkered or boorish men whose foibles and fragility seemingly are the point. But these stories about gender also arrive at the most unsatisfying insights: In the title story, the sex-obsessed protagonist ultimately “realize[s] that, with women you’ll never stand a chance of sleeping with, it’s better to learn as much as you can about them, until lust gives way to other feelings.” Many of these stories, though punctuated with flashes of mordant humor, conclude with similarly pithy, oddly formal lessons.
Earthy, spare stories that paint a bleak portrait of human shortcomings.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-936932-56-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
The thirty-one stories of the late Flannery O'Connor, collected for the first time. In addition to the nineteen stories gathered in her lifetime in Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965) and A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955) there are twelve previously published here and there. Flannery O'Connor's last story, "The Geranium," is a rewritten version of the first which appears here, submitted in 1947 for her master's thesis at the State University of Iowa.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1971
ISBN: 0374515360
Page Count: 555
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1971
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
In a word: magnificent.
Retrospect and resolution, neither fully comprehended nor ultimately satisfying: such are the territories the masterful Munro explores in her tenth collection.
Each of its eight long tales in the Canadian author’s latest gathering (after Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, 2001, etc.) bears a one-word title, and all together embrace a multiplicity of reactions to the facts of aging, changing, remembering, regretting, and confronting one’s mortality. Three pieces focus on Juliet Henderson, a student and sometime teacher of classical culture, who waits years (in “Chance”) before rediscovering romantic happiness with the middle-aged man with whom she had shared an unusual experience during a long train journey. In “Soon,” Juliet and her baby daughter Penelope visit Juliet’s aging parents, and she learns how her unconventional life has impacted on theirs. Then, in “Silence,” a much older Juliet comes sorrowfully to terms with the emptiness in her that had forever alienated Penelope, “now living the life of a prosperous, practical matron” in a world far from her mother’s. Generational and familial incompatibility also figure crucially in “Passion,” the story (somewhat initially reminiscent of Forster’s Howards End) of a rural girl’s transformative relationship with her boyfriend’s cultured, “perfect” family—and her realization that their imperfections adumbrate her own compromised future. Further complexities—and borderline believable coincidences and recognitions—make mixed successes of “Trespasses,” in which a young girl’s unease about her impulsive parents is shown to stem from a secret long kept from her, and “Tricks,” an excruciatingly sad account of a lonely girl’s happenstance relationship with the immigrant clockmaker she meets while attending a Shakespeare festival, the promise she tries and helplessly fails to keep, and the damaging misunderstanding that, she ruefully reasons, “Shakespeare should have prepared her.” Then there are the masterpieces: the title story’s wrenching portrayal of an emotionally abused young wife’s inability to leave her laconic husband; and the brilliant novella “Powers,” which spans years and lives, a truncated female friendship that might have offered sustenance and salvation, and contains acute, revelatory discriminations between how women and men experience and perceive “reality.”
In a word: magnificent.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-4281-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
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