Intense, melancholy, occasionally overworked, De Sa’s brooding debut illumines displacement and despair with glinting...
Linked episodes in the life of an émigré from a Portuguese fishing community in the Azores trace bitter legacies through three generations.
Barnacle love, meaning painfully conflicted passion—powerfully realized in the image of a marriage bed strewn with glass and barnacle shells in the title story—is the emotion that haunts Canadian De Sa’s dark, lyrical, sparely evoked sequence of tales, a finalist for the Giller Prize. Complicated connections between parents and children mark several stories, notably “Of God and Cod,” in which central figure Manuel Rebelo, favored by his harsh mother over his siblings, escapes the mid-Atlantic island of his birth and is almost drowned. Rescue will lead to romance, then a revelation of deception, in “Reason to Blame,” and as Manuel’s life unravels, so new disappointments occur. The title story explains his marriage to Georgina, not his first choice. And the volume’s second half, narrated by his son Antonio, exposes the parents’ unhappiness and Manuel’s financial failure. “Senhor Canada” observes Manuel and Antonio on Canada Day, the father drunk and sentimentally patriotic, the son consumed with shame. Sometimes overemphatic, the narrative sequence is threaded with themes and symbols: broken glass, suspicions of the church, “good hurt,” the need to escape. Manuel’s frustration and despair reach their apogee in “Mr. Wong Presents Jesus,” in which tragedy hovers on Christmas Eve.
Intense, melancholy, occasionally overworked, De Sa’s brooding debut illumines displacement and despair with glinting literary highlights.Pub Date: Aug. 31, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-56512-926-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2010
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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