Every great writer deserves a tribute like this magnificent gathering. Nathalie Babel has honored her father’s memory and...
An enormous—and enormously important—retrospective collection assembles for the first time in any language all the surviving work of the great Russian Jewish writer (1894–1941) who was murdered in a Stalinist prison camp.
Babel’s own terrible story is told in a moving preface and afterword contributed by this volume’s editor and guiding spirit, his daughter Nathalie. Babel earned early fame for the crisp prose and blunt realism with which he depicted the misfortunes of war while serving as a correspondent and propagandist with the Red Army in Poland in the wake of the 1917 Revolution. The great works from this period include unsparingly detailed portrayals of poverty and terror on the home front as well as battlefield pieces (where Babel unwisely named names and exposed strategical blunders) both fictional and journalistic (including “Reports” from various fronts). He soon broadened his approach, with “Odessa Stories” about his birthplace and its notorious criminal underclass, and classic autobiographical tales (notably “First Love” and “The Story of My Dovecote”). The collection also includes Babel’s revealing “1920 Diary” (which was not intended for publication, and in which we see his devotion to revolutionary principles begin to crumble); two complete plays (the better, “Sunset,” is a virtuosic distillation of his Odessa tales); and nearly 200 pages’ worth of screenplays written for silent film director Sergei Eisenstein. Reading Babel, one is reminded at various times of the young Tolstoy, Maupassant, Chekhov, Stephen Crane, and Sholom Aleichem (several of whose works he in fact adapted for the screen). Still, he’s a writer ultimately unlike any other: a chronicler of the extremes to which human beings subject one another, whose clarity and precision give his harsh fiction an intensely lyrical and visual luminosity.
Every great writer deserves a tribute like this magnificent gathering. Nathalie Babel has honored her father’s memory and given readers a book to be endlessly reread, and treasured.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2001
ISBN: 0-393-04846-2
Page Count: 992
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2001
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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