A stunning, altogether irresistible collection.
With painstaking precision, Booker-winner Byatt (A Whistling Woman, 2002, etc.) analyzes the frailty, impermanence, and disturbing complexity of the human body.
Otherworldly and folkloric motifs link this new collection of five stories with earlier similar volumes (e.g., Elementals, 1999), especially as seen in its opening tale, “The Thing in the Forest.” This introduces two young girls, Penny and Primrose, WWII II refugees, who wander one day from the castle where they’re housed in a forest clearing, where they glimpse a monstrous misshapen form. The “thing,” seemingly “made of rank meat, . . . decaying vegetation, . . . [and] manmade materials,” haunts their imaginations forever after: it’s a powerful image of formative early fears that never leave us. “Body Art,” which interestingly continues the theme of corporeal irregularity and fluidity, details the combative yet mutually sustaining relationship between an emotionally Spartan gynecologist and the female free spirit who provokes and reshapes his emotions. The capacity “to make familiar things look strange” strongly affects an underachieving novelist-writing teacher in “Raw Material.” The breakdown of physical and intellectual form is movingly depicted in “The Pink Ribbon,” in which a retired classics professor tends to his unreachable wife, a mad babbling shadow of her composed former self, and unknowingly invites into their lives the figure that will bring them both release, and peace. And in the superb centerpiece, “A Stone Woman,” a survivor of life-threatening surgery undergoes a “metamorphosis” that takes her beyond her cramped personal world to the alluring landscape of Iceland (“where we are matter-of-fact about strange things”) and a strange, unforeseen and unimaginable liberation. It’s as if Isak Dinesen had magically reappeared, to give us one more unclassifiable baroque masterpiece. Byatt has never written better than in these exquisite stories that, together and thus arranged, assume the shape of a life from childhood through old age and death.
A stunning, altogether irresistible collection.Pub Date: May 2, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-4177-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
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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