An impressive collection about relationships in a turbulent Iran that offers powerful insights.
Based on her interviews with men who lived through the Iranian Revolution, the author delivers eight short stories that examine the human condition.
Moving freely between past and present, these narratives pit the romantic idealism of youth against the sobering reality of growing up, growing old, and growing apart. In “The Paris of the Middle East,” Nader Moradi and Mahta are young visionaries whose attempt to emulate the bohemian lifestyle of the European luminaries they so admire is thwarted by societal pressures to conform. Five years later, she lies in a hospital bed as he berates her for birthing a child he never wanted. Similarly, “Where Are We? We Are Here.” presents an unhappy marriage between Ali and Mariam, former political prisoners whose union was predicated on love notes and imagined similarities: “They had exchanged only momentary glances....Only short letters written in ink. And ink has its own enemies—air, water, time. It has an evaporating quality, just like love.” In “Errand Boy,” Hamid falls for Raha, a wealthy girl who frequents the yarn shop where he works, pursues her a bit too earnestly, and must settle for an arranged marriage after her family sends her away to escape his advances. These men are casualties of the times they live in, denied happiness for the sake of survival. So, too, is Iran itself. These engrossing tales with strongly drawn characters are also about a country halted in its tracks, an era of budding equality and freedom in the 1970s that gave way to years of shortages, rampant incarceration, paranoia, and morality police during the revolution. Even afterward, there are ex-soldiers broken by war, families torn apart by emigration, and residents challenged by a lingering sense of loyalty to the country that betrayed them. As Kousha (Voices from Iran, 2002) deftly observes: “They carried the unbearable weight of loss—loss of hope.” They also shoulder sacrifice, devotion, passion, shame, and regret. From “Father,” a brief glimpse of a husband tenderly caring for his wife after she miscarries, to “Second Marriage,” in which the protagonist grapples with the loss of his childhood sweetheart in an earthquake, these evocative stories artfully explore every facet of humanity.
An impressive collection about relationships in a turbulent Iran that offers powerful insights.Pub Date: April 19, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5450-8037-5
Page Count: 254
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
