Comparable to Jhumpa Lahiri’s Pulitzer-winner, Interpreter of Maladies, and very probably the beginning of a fine career.
A strong sense of character and place, and an impressive variety of themes and tones, distinguish this striking debut collection by a talented Indian-born American writer.
The ten stories, set in both India and the US, frequently deal with culture contrast and shock, and make especially good use of narrators and viewpoint characters who only partially understand the experiences they’re relating. For example, preadolescent Chik-Chik, a restaurant delivery boy whose romantic fascination with “The Lodger in Room 726” trembles—as he scarcely realizes—on the brink of a first sexual experience; or the young girl (in “Summer”) who’s molested while (literally) “play-acting” with her teenaged cousin; or the orphaned protagonist of “My Grandfather Dreams of Fences,” who must grow up before he grasps the motivating forces of his eponymous relative’s harsh treatment of less prosperous neighbors. The distances between people are also subtly traversed in the bittersweet title piece, about a mild-mannered husband whose chance viewing of a Western porn film troubles his relationship with his conservative wife; and the moving “Sixteen Days in December,” in which a young journalist’s conflicted feelings for her stroke-ridden father (and mentor) are observed against a background of heightening Hindu/Muslim violence. The best stories are those animated by the more unusual premises: notably “The Sculptor of Sands,” about a young artist whose discovery of a dead woman’s body sharpens his empathy and imagination to the point where he becomes a legendary—and, ultimately, mysteriously elusive—local figure; and “The Curry leaf Tree,” an intriguing fable in which young Dilip Alva, born with “a most sensitive nose” that enables him to distinguish subtle flavor combinations, survives the loss of his “gift,” a traumatic relocation to America, and a rickety marriage to “a woman capable of serving mass-produced, cheese-covered pizza, out of spite.”
Comparable to Jhumpa Lahiri’s Pulitzer-winner, Interpreter of Maladies, and very probably the beginning of a fine career.Pub Date: April 16, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-42111-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2002
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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