Could have benefited from more fictionalizing.
Archer (False Impression, 2006, etc.) presents a dozen stranger-than-fiction stories.
All 12 of these stories, the author insists, are based on actual incidents, nine of them anecdotes he picked up during his two years as a guest of Her Majesty. Many of the tales involve scams. A thief manipulates two acquisitive brothers to run up the price of a fabled chess piece. A middle-class couple plunders the post office in which they’ve invested when its status is downgraded. A lorry driver agrees to so many smuggling schemes that they become his life’s work. An accountant and an events arranger conspire to upgrade her salary and launder the proceeds at the roulette table, and a Florentine restaurateur takes a more literal approach to laundering his income. Even criminals aiming higher, or lower, are equally ingenious and unsuccessful. A man poisons his inconvenient wife during a visit to St. Petersburg by hiding the “Don’t Drink the Water” signs. A prisoner breaks out of a minimum-security jail to kill his girlfriend and her current lover. A retiring Bombay police commissioner gives an incorrigible swindler a second chance by hiring him as a file clerk. Any of these stories would make a terrific anecdote in a crowded bar, but none of them is heartfelt or ingenious enough to stand on its own as an offering to strangers asked to invest serious time and money. The same goes for the items that didn’t originate in prison dialogues: a Greek paterfamilias accidentally killed at a wedding he’s graced with his presence; a second marriage that reveals exactly why an old friend was drawn to his wealthy behemoth of a wife; and a judge’s stratagem for dealing with a wife determined to bankrupt the husband she’s divorcing.
Could have benefited from more fictionalizing.Pub Date: March 20, 2007
ISBN: 0-312-36264-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2006
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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