Fragola, a broadcasting and film profressor, links seven light and likable stories about growing up Sicilian in Syracuse, New York, a subject familiar to readers of Jerre Mangione’s classic Mount Allegro, which shares the same nostalgia for a lost way of life in nearby Syracuse. These elegiac fictions focus on the relationship of a boy and his immigrant grandparents, especially his grandmother, with whom he spends most of his time, since both of his parents have to work. In —Feast of the Dead,— the grown-up narrator remembers Gram’s cooking and sayings, along with his youthful resistance to her old-country ways and superstitions. Despite himself, he comes to recognize the ghost of his maternal grandfather, long gone, as this specter inhabits the boy’s body on All Hallow’s Eve. Until he’s seven, the narrator sleeps with Gram (—In My Grandmother’s Bed—) and even conspires to prevent her remarriage, which would take her away from him. Later, she convinces him of the evil eye’s power (and tells how to counter it) and also teaches him how to i.d. a witch (—The Evil Eye— and —La Strega—). His sadness for the passing of tradition surfaces in —Ceci-Nuts—: he realizes there’s no one to replace the old couple who—ve sold roasted beans for years on end at the annual feast. In the moving memoir of his paternal grandfather (—The Garden—), the narrator finally comes to understand the old man’s bitterness, and begins to appreciate his magnificent terraced backyard, which goes to ruin after his death. —In Exile—,the last piece in the collection, smartly disabuses the college-aged narrator of any romantic notions concerning the old country: On a trip there in his 20s, he finds little but squalor and suspicion. Fragola offers family memories in no-frills prose. Anyone partial to the heady aroma of tomato sauce simmering on the stove will want to savor this modest volume; others might be less impressed.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-55071-036-2
Page Count: 108
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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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