Well-crafted storytelling, with a few real gems.
A solid if unexceptional second collection from Divakaruni (Arranged Marriage, 1995, etc.), this time focused on women striving to create new identities while gracefully incorporating the old.
Young or old, escaping or searching, Divakaruni's Indian characters find themselves at pivotal points where readers can clearly see the impact of traditional culture on the lives they lead in new lands. In "The Blooming Season for Cacti," a young woman escaping riots in Bombay strikes off on her own for California. Mira soon finds work at an Indian restaurant and a home with the restaurateur's mistress, but things are not so different in Sacramento; the mistress is consumed by shame, and Mira is the object of a diner's marital aspirations. American-born Leela visits India for the first time in "The Lives of Strangers" and on a religious pilgrimage befriends the "cursed" Mrs. Das. After a series of misfortunes, though, Leela appropriates the group's superstitions and shuns the old woman, gaining acceptance but losing the tender intimacy they had shared. "The Names of Stars in Bengali" offers a lovely portrait of rural Indian life: a young mother brings her two boys to India to meet their grandmother, revisiting at a leisurely pace the joys of her childhood, which she shares with surprised sons who are used to a far more harried, Americanized parent. In the best piece here, "Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter," a widow living with her son's family in suburban Sunnyvale struggles to write a glowing account of her new life to a friend back home. What Mrs. Dutta conveys instead is the confusion prompted by complicated machines, the shock of disrespectful grandchildren, and the painful embarrassment she provokes in her daughter-in-law: a touching and simply expressed account of feeling hopelessly lost in an unfamiliar country.
Well-crafted storytelling, with a few real gems.Pub Date: April 17, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-49727-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
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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