Honor amid poverty from a still-growing voice.
Texan Casares debuts with nine stories about economic hardship and emotional resourcefulness in a cross-cultural zone straddling the US-Mexico border.
The pieces here—set in Brownsville, way, way south in Lone Star country—are broken into three categories with individual titles in an attempt to make them work as groups, but it’s a needless artifice. The opener (“Mr. Z”) tells of a young boy’s first job experience at a fireworks stand—an opportunity to lose economic innocence by giving away as many roman candles as he sells; “R.G.” is about a man’s intimate relationship with his hammer—his tools are his life—as he lends it to a better-off neighbor who promptly forgets the loan and comes to believe the hammer is his. In the next subgroup of stories we find “Domingo,” who works in the yard of a well-off gringo lady and contemplates his hopeless state and dead daughter while yet managing to find grace and faith in labor. In the final group, “Jerry Fuentes” is the funeral salesman swindler who takes a young narrator and his wife for a ride; “Yolanda” is the beautiful neighbor in whose imagined arms a teenaged narrator finds hope of better times that aren’t in the offing; and “Mrs. Perez” is an aging woman who finds meaning in a depressed world through bowling, of all things, and pride in her cherry-red ball that stands for fading allure. But what will happen when she witnesses the ball stolen before her very eyes and the thief turns out to be a relative? Casares’s prose is crisp and efficient, but he relies too heavily on an expected sympathy for the disenfranchised, and one wishes that the Español we get here—meant to paint a truly Hispanic world—went beyond the first three weeks of Spanish 101.
Honor amid poverty from a still-growing voice.Pub Date: March 6, 2002
ISBN: 0-316-14680-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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