The best new book of short fiction since Andrea Barrett’s Ship Fever. Keep your eye on Doerr.
This striking debut collection of eight stories offers several boldly imagined and scrupulously detailed explorations of the mysteries inherent in both the natural world and human interconnection.
People who live close to nature (or attempt to) are the protagonists of “A Tangle by the Rapid River,” an anecdote about an adulterous fisherman who can’t keep either his catch or his secrets, and “July Fourth,” a sly parable of America First optimism wrapped in an amusing tale of a bicontinental competition between US and British “sportfishermen.” Doerr strikes deeper in “The Hunter’s Wife,” a carefully developed story filled with fresh imagery about a Montana hunting guide and the free-spirited magician’s assistant whose inexplicable “foreign and keen sensitivity” to the souls of animals slowly drives them apart. People who can’t live where they’re meant to appear in “For a Long Time This Was Griselda’s Story,” in which a high-school volleyball phenom’s love for an itinerant carnival “metal-eater” is poignantly contrasted to her stay-at-home sister’s ordinary life; and “Mkondo,” about an Ohio “fossil hunter’s” troubled marriage to the impulsive Tanzanian girl whom he brings home, only to learn they’re “leveraged apart by the incompatibility of their respective landscapes.” Doerr’s meanings emerge more subtly in the title story, whose unnamed protagonist, a blind man living alone in Kenya, accidentally “cures” the victim of a venomous snail bite, and is mistaken for a great healer. But even this excellent story is dwarfed by “The Caretaker,” the brilliantly compact tale of Joseph Saleeby, a thief and idler who is uprooted and transformed by Liberia’s appallingly violent civil war, makes his way to the Oregon coast, fails in his duties as a literal caretaker, then lives as a recluse seeking atonement for his crimes and a place where he can belong. This is one of the great contemporary stories: an Edenic myth of sin and retribution, and, just possibly, Doerr’s ingenious variation on Flannery O’Connor’s masterpiece “The Displaced Person.”
The best new book of short fiction since Andrea Barrett’s Ship Fever. Keep your eye on Doerr.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2002
ISBN: 0-7432-1274-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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