Stylish and deeply imagined.
A collection of elliptical stories in which death throws a long shadow over an eclectic group of characters.
There's a man who builds houses for the dead in case they come back to life, a taxidermist who learned her art from her late father, and two fossil hunters in a love triangle. The 19 stories in Sparks' second collection (May We Shed These Human Bodies, 2012) are shot through with fabulist elements and are rarely more than a few pages long, making them read like fairy tales or prose poems. And as with poetry, the strength of the collection is Sparks’ lush, lyrical writing, saturating the dark, death-filled stories with beauty. Many of the stories, in fact, feature characters trying to find solace—either through love or through art—in the face of loss. In “The Fires of Western Heaven,” about the aftermath of war, the anonymous first-person plural narrator admits, “We write, we sing, we paint, and still the blackness follows, still the dead are there in every note, every brushstroke.” In the collection’s title piece (which, at novella length, is the book’s longest, by far), Set, a young man who has always felt like half a ghost after a childhood bear attack, crosses paths with Inge, whose family and home have been decimated by tragedy. Sparks interweaves Inge’s and Set’s histories together with descriptions of items from Set’s dead brother’s “Cabinet of Curiosities,” a collection of mysterious items—extinct birds’ eggs, burned baby teeth—that haunts Set. Sparks’ stories, too, function much like the curiosities in the cabinet: finely wrought, strange, and sometimes inscrutable. When Inge wonders, “Was the world crowded with ghosts?” the collection answers for her: yes. Luckily for readers, we have Sparks to guide us through the underworld.
Stylish and deeply imagined.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63149-090-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
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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