Nothing too surprising, but the stories are pleasant and evocative.
Never-before-published stories from the prolific—and increasingly nostalgic—author of classics such as Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles.
In the introduction to this collection, Bradbury (Now and Forever, 2007, etc.) advises the reader to “enjoy” the stories rather than “think about them too much. Just try to love them as I love them,” and these are indeed stories for enjoyment rather than for existential agony. We find here the usual range: some stories are sci-fi right out of the 1950s, some are eerily edgy, and some are a bit dewy-eyed. In “Fly Away Home,” Bradbury revisits familiar territory, the colonization of Mars. After a six-month, 60-million-mile voyage on the First Rocket, the pioneers almost immediately feel alienated and alone on the harsh Red planet, but the team psychiatrist had anticipated this estrangement and arranged for a Second Rocket to arrive, one containing all the accoutrements of Main Street and its sentimental attachments to the home planet—the crew is even able to get pineapple malts at the Martian drugstore. In “Arrival and Departure,” one of Bradbury’s most poignant flights of fancy, an old couple finally escapes their dreary indoor life and exultingly drinks in the glories of spring only to discover by the end of the day that they’re much more comfortable in the circumscribed and lonely life they’ve been living in their house. In the amusing “A Literary Encounter,” Charlie takes on the persona of whatever literary work he happens to be reading at the moment. His wife Marie is not too pleased when Charlie’s reading the expansive Thomas Wolfe or the ultraformal Samuel Johnson, so she persuades him to get reacquainted with the ten romantic books he was absorbed in when he was courting her.
Nothing too surprising, but the stories are pleasant and evocative.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-167013-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2008
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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