In a collection of 17 exquisitely calibrated stories, this noted Lebanese writer (Beirut Blues, 1995, etc.) explores the lives of Arabs living on the cusp of modernity. With few exceptions, the people al-Shaykh writes about are urban residents, middle class, and comparatively well educated. They live in Africa, Morocco, London, or Beirut and are just as likely to be Christian as Moslem. For them, the traditional ways are not so much dying as lately relegated to a cultural storeroom, brought out for special occasions (notably when women assert themselves in love, marriage, or work). In one traditionally resonant tale, —Qutal-Quylub,— a group of skeptical village women, whose husbands are all working abroad, learn that a local magician, who claims she can do business only by moonlight, has found a comely young man to share her bed. In another, —The Land of Dreams,— a Danish missionary’s proselytizing efforts are undercut by the charms of Yemeni villagers. A beautiful young woman in —The Marriage Fair— prefers the transports of love to the stability of marriage, which she fears will snuff out all possible excitements. Determined, strong-willed women abound in al-Shaykh’s fiction. One of them, in —A Season of Madness,— feigns lunacy in order to divorce her husband and marry her lover, while a young war widow from Beirut (in —The White Peacock of Holland Park—) gradually grows obsessed with a poet. The title story tartly describes a young woman set on living in England, no matter how menial her life there, because it—ll still be better than Morocco, where one can do nothing but “sweep the sun off the rooftops.” Stories, in all, that glow with empathy and intelligence.
Pub Date: Sept. 17, 1998
ISBN: 0-385-49127-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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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