Translator Schaefer and her publisher have performed an invaluable literary service. One hopes more of Schnitzler’s eerily...
One of the most distinctive and compelling voices of the early modernist movement is heard again in this elegant collection of nine urbane, perversely comic, deeply disturbing stories.
The Austrian Schnitzler (1862–1931), who is perhaps better known for his equally incisive plays (including The Merry-Go-Round and The Green Cockatoo), was a practicing physician whose austere, clinical studies of sexual obsession and abnormal psychology won the admiration of his countryman Sigmund Freud and compare favorably with the intense, exploratory fiction of Svevo, Musil, Bernanos, and Moravia. Schnitzler’s mastery of the technique of interior monologue is brilliantly demonstrated by such deftly structured contes as “The Dead Are Silent” (a chilling glimpse into the mind and heart of a married woman who survives the carriage accident in which her lover dies) and “The Second” (whose narrator’s ingenuous celebration of the “code” of dueling in fact reveals the barbarity of that practice). Even better is the title novella, about a young army officer whose lofty criticism of a comrade’s gambling addiction ironically foreshadows his own moral collapse. Schnitzler’s complex presentations of the ambiguities of love and hatred, sanity and madness, convention and anarchy include a wittily extended jeu in which a celebrated opera singer blithely manipulates her several admirers and lovers (“Baron von Leisenborg’s Destiny”) and the novella “Dream Story” (bastardized unpardonably in Stanley Kubrick’s brain-dead film Eyes Wide Shut). This latter is an ingenious blend of realism and dream: here, a happily married physician and his faithful wife yield themselves up to erotic adventuring and fantasizing, experiencing a Walpurgisnächt that tests their sexual and psychic limits, and opens their eyes to the realities of their natures together and apart. It’s a great story (reminiscent, in an odd way, of Joyce’s “The Dead’), perhaps Schnitzler’s best.
Translator Schaefer and her publisher have performed an invaluable literary service. One hopes more of Schnitzler’s eerily precise fiction (and perhaps a selection of his plays?) is soon forthcoming.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2002
ISBN: 1-56663-386-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2001
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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