Silber travels the globe and the centuries with ease. If more collections were like this one, readers would gladly abandon...
Six stories, delicately intertwined “by a great net of glorious strands,” in a standout second collection from Silber (In My Other Life, 2000, etc.).
The first of these longish tales, “My Shape,” follows Alice (each story spans decades of its narrator’s life), a buxom young woman who wants to dance. She has a vagabond’s life, living with unsatisfying men until she gets a job on a French cruise ship and marries Jean-Pierre. The two move to France; then Alice returns alone to America, where she tries once more to dance (tutored by a sadist named Duncan Fischbach), until later in life she meets one Giles back in Paris and finds out finally what love can be. “The High Road” first takes up the life of Duncan Fischbach when he falls in love with Andre, then revisits him when he’s old: having given up on the whole idea, he falls passionately, and chastely in love with Carl, a young singer performing the work of Italian poet Gaspara Stampa. “Gaspara Stampa,” in turn, imagines the short life of the Renaissance poet, fleshing out the inspiration for her poetry, which glorifies the pain and suffering of love as much as honoring its comforts and joys. “Ashes of Love,” a more contemporary tale, follows young lovers Tom and Peggy as they travel the globe, adventuring, sightseeing, arguing, saving up money back in New York and then traveling again, until Peggy gets pregnant and everything irreversibly changes. The title story is set in China at the turn of the 20th century as a young missionary couple (the great-grandparents of Tom’s wife) and their children attempt to convert the Chinese. The proselytizers are naïve, too blinded by their own sweet devotion to Christ to see real trouble when it comes in the form of the Boxer Rebellion. Last is Giles’s story, “The Same Ground,” a meditation on love.
Silber travels the globe and the centuries with ease. If more collections were like this one, readers would gladly abandon the novel.Pub Date: April 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-393-05908-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
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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