Two lively if oddly focused stories about real people caught up in twin forms of violence.
Eighty-six-year-old Neider, a much-acclaimed Mark Twain scholar and Antarctica explorer (The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones, 1956, filmed as One-Eyed Jacks), presents two short novels, apparently his first published fiction since the ill-advised A Visit to Yazoo (1956).
In the title story, George Barber, an American nature photographer, flies to McMurdo Sound in Antarctica, the site of Mount Erebus with its fiery lake of molten lava, then boards an icebreaker, The Penguin, captained by Jack Torneau, who unaccountably takes a dislike to his passenger. Humiliatingly, the photographer is quartered not with fellow observers but in a far-off, dark, cramped rack with only a red light to see by. It’s a poor place to experience the gloriously described Southern Ocean, which has the world’s worst, most turbulent waters. Is the rather girlish captain, who has a weak stomach, fearful that Barber’s photos will expose his femininity? At the Grotto Berg itself, a spectacular thing with Roman arches so big the ship can actually sail into them, Barber gets his photos but disaster befalls the ship. In the companion novella, The Left Eye Cries First, Sid Little, 63, an early-retired Long Island attorney, has his second bar mitzvah and—at the urging of a friend’s lingering but fatal illness, and also of a dream of his homeland—decides that Gorbachev being in power is a sign that he should return to Ukraine. Sid hasn’t been there since his family fled the country when he was 11. His trip brings back rich memories of his Russian-Jewish childhood and early sexual experiences, there and in Paris. When he comes home to his still-alive but dying friend, his own health reassures him.
Two lively if oddly focused stories about real people caught up in twin forms of violence.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8154-1123-5
Page Count: 200
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2001
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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