Filled with clear-eyed observations, this elegant debut frequently alights on romantic disappointment (men come across...
The internal and external struggles of modern Eastern European immigrants are explored in Ukrainian native Krasikov’s debut short-story collection.
America remains a tantalizing paradox of opportunity and limitation for the steely folks who populate Krasikov’s world. While many of the stories are told from the point of view of women, hailing from the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, the characters differ greatly both in terms of economic opportunity and religious affinity—even as they all share a certain longing for love and connection. The 40-ish live-in companion of an elderly man feels an unexpected attachment to her ailing roommate in a relationship initially based on mutual convenience. A mother working in Yonkers is reunited with her son after several years, barely recognizing the surly Tbilisi-bred teen he has grown into, while a strong-willed diner waitress quickly outgrows the thuggish 22-year-old American husband she married to stay in the country. A guilt-ridden, wealthy Jewish businessman (one of the rare male protagonists) tracks down the college-aged daughter of his dead first love, for reasons that are not even clear to him. The longest piece bounces back and forth between the United States and Moscow to trace the journey of a young accountant who, after an ill-advised and professionally compromising affair with a married co-worker, decompresses by visiting old friends in Moscow.
Filled with clear-eyed observations, this elegant debut frequently alights on romantic disappointment (men come across especially badly) while leaving just enough room for hope.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-385-52439-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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
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