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
Carefully worked tales that are as good as many and better than most.
A first collection from Irish-born Keegan spans the Atlantic, touching down in rural Ireland and the southern US—with results often familiar or stretched-for, yet deftly done and alluringly readable.
In the title story, a happily married woman wants to find out what it’s like to have sex with someone else—and does so indeed, in a psychological clunker that crosses Hitchcock with O. Henry while remaining ever-intriguing to the eye. A near-wizardry of language and detail, too, closes the volume, with “The Ginger Rogers Sermon,” when a pubescent girl in Ireland, sexually curious, brings about the suicide of a hulking lumberman in a tone-perfect but morally inert story. In between are longer and shorter, greater and lesser tales. Among the better are “Men and Women,” about a suffering Irish farmwife who at last rebels against a cruelly domineering husband; the southern-set “Ride If You Dare,” about a couple who shyly meet after running personals ads; and “Stay Close to the Water’s Edge,” about a Harvard student who despises—and is despised by—his millionaire stepfather. Psychologically more thin or commonplace are “Storms,” told by an Irish daughter whose mother went mad; “Where the Water’s Deepest,” a snippet about an au pair afraid of “losing” her charge; or “The Singing Cashier”—based on fact, we’re rather pointlessly told—about a couple who, unbeknownst to their neighbors, commit “hideous acts on teenage girls.” Keegan’s best include the more maturely conceived “Passport Soup,” about a man devoured by guilt and grief after his daughter goes missing while in his care; “Quare Name for a Boy,” in which a young woman, pregnant by a single-fling boyfriend whom she no longer has an interest in, determines that she’ll go on into motherhood without him; and the nicely sustained “Sisters”—one dutiful and plain, the other lovely and self-indulgent—who come to a symbolically perfect end.
Carefully worked tales that are as good as many and better than most.Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-87113-779-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
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