Three entertaining sketches, though mostly of interest to fans of The Leopard.
Three parablelike pieces of short fiction from Lampedusa (1896-1957), best known for The Leopard (1958), his sweeping novel about Sicilian aristocracy.
This trio of stories doesn’t provide a large enough sample size to determine if Lampedusa could have been a great short-form writer, but each is marked by an ironic wit and the intimate knowledge of Italian class distinctions that infuses The Leopard. “The Professor and the Siren” is narrated by a young journalist who allows himself to be routinely browbeaten for his ignorance by an aging scholar of ancient Greece. Set during the rise of fascism in Italy, the tale is an allegory about the perils of forgetting the past, but Lampedusa gives that message a lively and subtle cast, turning on the scholar’s alleged encounter with a mermaid. “Joy and the Law” is a brief comic story about a man whose Christmas bonus includes a large cake that proves to be a burdensome reminder of his obligations to others, and it’s as light as its “easy come, easy go” message. The closing, “The Blind Kittens,” is made of much more ambitious stuff and was written as the first chapter of a follow-up to The Leopard. Centered on the Ibba family, whose rapacious land grabs have made it one of the most powerful forces in Sicily, the story follows a group of men gossiping. As they exchange “envies, grudges, fears,” they also share rumors about the clan, and in their chatter lays a hint of a widescreen epic that would capture the family’s rise to power. But it has punch as a stand-alone story about jealousy, with a glint of humor: “[E]ach of them wished for Ibba’s millions so that others would invent similarly sumptuous lies about him,” Lampedusa writes.
Three entertaining sketches, though mostly of interest to fans of The Leopard.Pub Date: July 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59017-719-8
Page Count: 96
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
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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