In all these stories, love and goodness ultimately win out, but the charming details and bittersweet human cost are what...
In these five long stories, McCall Smith (The Revolving Door of Life, 2016, etc.) imagines the worlds he has glimpsed in the black-and-white photographs he shares with the reader.
“Sister Flora’s First Day of Freedom” opens with the volume’s most compelling photograph: the back of a woman about to step out of a shaft of light, “at the point where an old life was consigned to the past and an entirely different life was being embarked upon.” Having inherited some money and quit her convent, Flora arrives in Edinburgh to find a husband. Her tart matter-of-factness keeps the mood of possibility and good fortune from turning cloying. “Angels in Italy” opens with an elderly Scottish woman in Italy showing a young man a photo of herself as a young girl leading a smaller girl on a pony beside an unhappy-looking boy on a bike. That boy grew up to become a famous painter, the subject of a magazine profile the young man is writing. The old woman tells the story of her complicated relationship with the artist, and the young man writes it down “exactly how it happened.” There are three people in the “Dear Ventriloquist” photo: a woman, the man sitting on her lap, and “the person behind the camera.” This portrait of a mild love triangle in a Canadian traveling circus is feather-light. So is “The Woman with the Beautiful Car.” The 1907 Standard Tourer belongs to the woman facing the camera, while two men change its tire. She is a young Irish heiress, one of the men the village teacher. Their meet-cute romance is a snapshot of man-made coincidence involving tacks. “He Wanted to Believe in Tenderness,” with its picture of a smiling soldier beside a woman whose expression is enigmatic, challenges McCall Smith’s generally sunny outlook. The story includes both a grim prisoner-of-war experience and three marital betrayals.
In all these stories, love and goodness ultimately win out, but the charming details and bittersweet human cost are what resonate.Pub Date: July 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-87125-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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