A grim but compelling composite portrait by a talented writer.
The third book from Szalay, one of Granta's most recent group of Best Young British Novelists, is a tightly woven, precisely observed novel in stories, nine of them, about men adrift, lonely, wandering, and wondering.
The book's conceit is imaginative, its architecture impressive. The men depicted range in age from 17 (a callow, awkward university student on a budget trip through Europe with his more outgoing and lusty friend) to 73 (a retired government minister on a winter trip to his damp, mouse-infested cottage in Italy, where he's retreated not so much to lick his wounds as to catalog his infirmities as old age settles in). In between we meet a drifting young French tourist in search of sex and adventure who finds them in an unexpected form, or rather forms; a hypocritical Danish tabloid journalist chasing a scandal; a middle-aged English blowhard and expat in Croatia whose life is in epic collapse; and a Russian oligarch whose empires of metallurgy, marriage, and self-created mythology are crumbling. These men and the others (a selfish academic medievalist whose girlfriend is pregnant, a Hungarian bodyguard who's fallen in love with the jet-setting prostitute he's protecting, and a seller of high-end real estate who's chafing at his sense of being settled) resemble one another in several ways. All are sex- and/or power-obsessed, all away from home, all solitary, all in the grips of overwhelming inertia and of the philosophic realization, in some cases explicit and in some tacit, that "Life is not a joke." One may wish their circumstances were less cramped and airless, their ideas of manhood more capacious (and that women played a fuller role in their lives), but Szalay writes with subtlety and pathos about these flawed and floundering figures, none quite able to feel like the protagonist of his own life story.
A grim but compelling composite portrait by a talented writer.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-55597-753-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
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BOOK REVIEW
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