by Henry Shukman ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 25, 2006
A skillfully crafted, eclectic collection.
Known primarily for his travel writing and poetry (Savage Pilgrims, 1997, etc.), Shukman here offers three stories and a novella tracking the rueful meanderings of hapless Western travelers.
“Mortimer of the Maghreb” was once the nom de guerre of aging Brit Charles Mortimer, who enjoyed a sensational career as a far-flung journalist but who now, at age 56, finds his reputation faltering. Encamped with the insurgents in a dubious civil war on the Moroccan border, he no longer has the stomach for conflict. The novella shows Charles filling his notebook with self-pitying reflections to ex-wife Saskia and staggering around the desert in a “daze of remorse” for former lover Celeste, a French photographer with whom he shared his finest moments. Shukman’s characters are eaten up and spit out. They are citizens of the world: “a global man, highly trained [who] long ago severed the ties that bind” is how Harry Burton, for example, is described in “Castaway,” which follows his wanderings while the privileged, solitary traveler is stuck on the island of Inagua. “Darien Dogs” calls rich securities banker Jim Rogers “a modern-day hunter-gatherer”; arriving in Panama to secure the construction of a new oil pipeline, he gradually succumbs to the snares of a fetching local prostitute. In “Old Providence,” hubris loses famed British painter Rothman Case the love of his life. Awash in drink by middle age, he recognizes that the moment of bottoming out also affords him his first glimpse of artistic freedom.
A skillfully crafted, eclectic collection.Pub Date: May 25, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-4325-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2006
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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
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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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