A follow-up collection (after 1994’s Vol. I) of deliciously eerie, enigmatic, and resonant symbolic fictions by the recently deceased Italian author (The Iguana, 1984). Ortese’s stories, written over more than a half-century of courageously sustained creative effort, are deftly declarative explorations of their author’s own inquiring sensibility, packed with autobiographical details and observations and explicitly discursive reportage. In them, the author frequently presents herself as the writer dreaming imaginative responses to crises (personal and global alike) that threaten the familial and aesthetic values she cherishes. —Folletto in Genoa,— for example, presents a family transfigured by madness as a grotesque metaphor for —the unification of Italy.— In “Redskin,” an introspective girl contrives a fabulistic escape from the looming certainty of war and a beloved brother’s death in battle. “Fantasies” is an involuted tale that reveals, in effect, how it was conceived and written; and in “Nebel (A Lost Story),” Ortese confides to us, in medias res, her uncertainty about how to develop her story. Her insistent lushness and lyricism (beautifully served by Martin’s graceful translation) is memorably displayed in a sharply detailed “tour” of Rome’s Via Floria (“The Great A Street”), and particularly in a celebratory portrayal of the rich variety of a writer’s imagination (“The Villa”). And in the most Kafkaesque story here, “Slanting Eyes,” a young girl’s —worship— of her remote father is expanded into a darkly comic mock-biblical fantasy. Ortese is often disarmingly funny (“on the subject of mountains, I have to say that here there were no mountains”), and there’s something very attractive in her open espousal of the pleasure and healing power inherent in literary artifice (a concluding autobiographical essay, “Where Time is Another,” ruminates engagingly on her passion for “self-expression” among a family largely indifferent to it, and as a citizen of a country that has suppressed it). Enchanting stuff, from a unique writer. If you like Borges, you’ll like Ortese.
Pub Date: May 29, 1998
ISBN: 0-929701-56-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1998
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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