by Gordon Lish ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 13, 2000
Lish, with his ups and downs, is still our Joyce, our Beckett, our most true modernist. Buy! Read! Listen up!
After such great Lish novels as Epigraph (1996) and Arcade, or How to Write a Novel (1998), a volume of mere stories can seem slight stuff; but moments here, even so, place Lish among the top few still writing what once was called `serious` literature.
The tiny `Facts of Steel` sets out a poetics, announcing that `Nothing would please me more than for me as an artist to be free to sit here and tell you the truth. But they won't let me do it.` Who `they` is may puzzle some while confirming for others that in mass-culture `truth` is increasingly a taboo—which is why, says Lish, `I have no choice but to resort to ruse after ruse. God knows I get no pleasure from it . . . . But am I the one who has the say?` And the `ruses` here when brilliant are brilliant indeed, though when meager, meager with a vengeance. `Ground` recollects childhood in a way so tedious (a boy pretends his two fingers are a walking man) that it refuses to be interesting, except possibly for the author (and not even that for sure); the same goes, say, for the overreaching of `The Positions,` a teeny tale whose speaker claims that `the best thing in my life` has been pulling lint from under the clothes dryer. On the other hand, the simple buying of a new window shade, in `Physis versus Nomos,` captivates with sheer smartness and drollery, while `Man on the Go,` about a widower and a misbehaving washing machine, gets a perfect ten for laugh-out-loud funny. The travel-tale `Among the Pomeranians` may be slow, but so what when `How the Sophist Got Spotted,` for example, is a true Beckettian tour de force, or when `Mercantilism` wraps up whole lives and entire eras in a brilliance of wit, woe, and words.
Lish, with his ups and downs, is still our Joyce, our Beckett, our most true modernist. Buy! Read! Listen up!Pub Date: May 13, 2000
ISBN: 1-56858-154-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000
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by Tim O’Brien ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 28, 1990
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
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SEEN & HEARD
by Rattawut Lapcharoensap ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2005
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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