Bowles was a great writer whom many readers may find hard to stomach (imagine a collaboration among Tennessee Williams,...
Lavish first collected edition of Bowles’s harsh, unsparing short fiction—published in conjunction with Ecco’s 30th anniversary: 62 elegantly wrought, compact nightmare visions, including the contents of classic earlier volumes, The Delicate Prey (1950) and The Time of Friendship (1967).
Bowles (1910–99) was the ultimate American expatriate writer (Robert Stone’s judicious introduction identifies him as “a cosmopolite who bridged the worlds of Gertrude Stein and Allen Ginsberg”): a longtime resident of Tangier, where he held court for numerous contemporaries and acolytes (many Beat Generation charter members among them), composed the music for which he’s also justly famous, and wrote pungent tales of Western values corrupted and consumed by the amoral appetite of impoverished, pre–literate Latin American and (especially) North African cultures. A limpid understated style and a gimlet eye for human weakness and folly are the hallmarks of such bleak fictional marvels as “The Delicate Prey” and “A Distant Episode” (in which the Moroccan desert seems itself a vengeful cannibalistic entity), a chillingly urbane account of the violation of an ultimate sexual taboo (“Pages from Cold Point”), a withering satire on misguided “civilizing” impulses (“Pastor Dowe at Tacaté”), and the troublingly enigmatic fablelike stories of Bowles’s highly interesting (if uneven) later (1981) collection, Midnight Mass. A few of the early stories are, arguably, apprentice work, and several written in the 1980s (notably “Hugh Harper”and “Dinner at Sir Nigel’s”) feel like scarcely dramatized retreads. On the other hand, don’t miss “Too Far from Home” (1993), another bitter black comedy about Western innocents adrift in the Sahara that conjures up images of both Bowles’s surpassingly strange marriage to neurasthenic novelist Jane Bowles (who predeceased him by decades) and the psychosexual labyrinth explored in his famous first novel, The Sheltering Sky.
Bowles was a great writer whom many readers may find hard to stomach (imagine a collaboration among Tennessee Williams, André Gide, and the Marquis de Sade). Those attuned to his hammer-blow rhetoric and nihilistic lyricism should find this generous volume just about irresistible.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-621273-1
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001
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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