A varied and absorbing collection of 16 stories by the Croatian-American author of Apricots from Chernobyl (not reviewed) and Yolk (1995). The influences of Kafka, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Bruno Schulz are traceable throughout Novakovich’s unsettling fiction, in which violence and death often lie just beneath ostensibly benign comic surfaces. Many of his protagonists are survivors of “the Balkan wars”: specifically, Serbia’s Yolk oppression of Croatia. “Fritz: A Fable”—in which a dog’s hatred for a cat deftly allegorizes ethnic and nationalistic enmity—brilliantly updates the beast fable, and there are irresistibly lively pictures of children’s ability to thrive in even hostile environments in stories like “Ice” and the delightfully anecdotal “The Devil’s Celluloid Tail.” A handful set in America memorably limn the immigrant experience (especially “The End,” which explores, in a densely packed 20 pages, the lingering culture shock endured by a Croatian family). The best of these pieces, which analyze the alienated states of people who regret or cannot make sense of their past allegiances, include “Sheepskin,” the confession of a war victim who murders the wrong man in what he thinks is an act of justified vengeance, then pursues his victim’s widow; “Rye Harvest,” the tale of an immigrant desperately seeking security who finally reaches the US only to learn he’ll be immediately deported; and “A Free Fall,” which describes with wonderfully mingled humor and pathos the whole arc of its disabled narrator’s life, “from sperm to worm.” Novakovich’s characters aren’t just survivors; they’re energetic, hopeful souls whose appetite for life is best expressed by their exuberant, playful sexuality—for which their author repeatedly finds fresh, amusing metaphors (during sex, a woman —felt as though she were a computer accessory, for him to move his cursor around, or, more likely, a bit of physical to augment his virtual reality—). First-rate fiction, from one of the best short-story writers of the decade.
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-55597-271-3
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1998
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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