Shades of Isaac Babel, Leonard Michaels, and Aleksandar Hemon in a nevertheless irresistibly original first book. (The...
Seven stories in a debut collection, Farrar, Straus’s lead title for spring (treated to an unheard-of, for FSG, prepublication tour), chronologically trace the experiences of a family of Russian Jews living in Toronto.
Thirty-year-old Latvian-born (now Canadian) author Bezmozgis introduces us to the stories’ common narrator, Mark Berman, as a six-year-old in “Tapka,” which recounts Mark’s parents’ and his own efforts to learn English, their relationship with a childless pair of fellow immigrants devoted to their pet dog, and the painful consequences of Mark’s carelessness, expressed as he brandishes his new language skills. The difficulties of assimilation into an unfamiliar culture are experienced by Mark’s father as he awkwardly attempts to establish his own business (“Roman Berman, Massage Therapist”), a cocky young weightlifter from the old country who loses his celebrity and self-assurance at an international competition (“The Second Strongest Man”), and preadolescent Mark himself, as he keeps getting into fights at Hebrew school and is admonished, on “Holocaust Day,” by a stern, sorrowful rabbi (“An Animal to the Memory”). In the wry title story, 16-year-old Mark is introduced to sex and confirmed in other bad habits by his precociously jaded younger cousin Natasha. This is the funniest, and loosest of the tales, notable also for the peripheral character of Mark’s phlegmatic criminal “contact” Rufus, a bookish drug peddler with amusingly diversified business interests. The two final stories widen Mark’s understanding—of the fact of mortality, during the summer when his “researches” into the history of an obscure Jewish heavyweight boxer (“Choynski”) coincide with his beloved babushka’s death; and of the embracing comfort of the religion he has taken for granted, when his widowed grandfather enters an old age home threatened by jealousy and prejudice (“Minyan”). Bezmogis’s spare, confrontational tales thus take many unexpected turns, but their humanity and poignancy strike the deepest notes.
Shades of Isaac Babel, Leonard Michaels, and Aleksandar Hemon in a nevertheless irresistibly original first book. (The stories originally appeared, in “slightly different form,” in the New Yorker, Harper’s, Zoetrope, etc.)Pub Date: June 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-374-28141-6
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004
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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