From veteran actor, writer, and current UNICEF ambassador-at- large Ustinov (The Old Man and Mr. Smith, 1991, etc.), nine stories suggestive of other days and styles, featuring some rather dated themes and humor. Most of the tales here are European in setting and reflect the world of the late '40s and '50s, with characters who embody every national stereotype. Which would be fine if Ustinov's strained satire worked, but it doesn't—with one exception: ``The Assassins,'' a labored but occasionally amusing riff involving a band of aging anarchists who are sent by the French police to Corsica on vacation every time they threaten to blow up a visiting world leader. The title piece follows the career of Mitzi, a Hungarian singer whose doleful admirer reminds her that ``life is not an operetta.'' The admirer, however, is repeatedly confounded by the remarkably resilient Mitzi, one of those ``impossible, dangerous and impervious people'' for whom ``life is an operetta after all, and can never be anything else.'' Other stories limn an American president and a Soviet leader, who, at the height of the Cold War, discover that they share a common passion for stamp- collecting, including even the same rare stamps (``Dream of Papua''); a newly married Englishwoman who decides that she's more in love with the dog an old lover gave her as a wedding present than with her boring husband (``The Gift of a Dog''); and a French banker, vacationing in Switzerland, who becomes embroiled in local feuds (``The Swiss Watch''). Most poignant and affecting of all is ``The Loneliness of Billiwoonga,'' which traces the struggles of a concentration camp survivor, his entire family lost in the Holocaust, to establish a new life in a small Australian town. He marries, then finds himself in business with a former Nazi officer, so anxious now to be liked that ``every gesture was a bribe, the payment of a debt on the installment system.'' Faded period charm.
Pub Date: July 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-57392-150-5
Page Count: 258
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1997
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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