Arvid’s is far from an unhappy childhood, but writing within a child’s limited vision, Petterson uses what’s unspoken to...
Readers of Petterson’s award-winning Out Stealing Horses (2007) will find this translation of the Norwegian author’s first published book, scheduled to appear in conjunction with his latest novel, I Refuse, takes a gentler approach to childhood.
Ten brief stories make up this minimalist coming-of-age tale set in the 1960s. Young Arvid grows up in a working-class family in Veitvet, outside Oslo. The book’s opening line—“Dad had a face that Arvid loved to watch, and at the same time made him nervous”—establishes the primary importance of Arvid’s father in his life. When the local shoe industry collapses and Dad loses his position as a factory foreman, Arvid is too young to understand the financial strain and exhibits an innocent’s brutal scorn at the toothbrushes Dad brings home from his new factory job. But the 6-year-old intuitively senses tensions in the household. When Arvid’s sensitivity to the anxiety causes bad dreams, Dad shows great gentleness. Then Arvid’s grandfather dies, and the boy’s first reaction is excitement that Dad, now the boss of the family, will allow him to use a previously off-limits canoe. But at the funeral, he becomes upset imagining Dad in the coffin. By the time he turns 8, Arvid is grown up enough to face grudgingly that others, like his fat neighbor Bomann, have complicated feelings. Bullied for refusing to acknowledge that people have sex, Arvid is secretly “sad” to face the truth he’s learned from Dad. A slightly older, tougher Arvid plays war games with his friends, taking boyish risks that could end disastrously but don’t, any more than the actual Cuban missile crisis that rivets his attention. Maturing from early obliviousness into a conscious sense of ambivalent responsibility, Arvid finds himself offering Dad the tender care he once received as Dad fights his own demons.
Arvid’s is far from an unhappy childhood, but writing within a child’s limited vision, Petterson uses what’s unspoken to wrench the reader’s heart.Pub Date: April 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-55597-700-9
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
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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