A vivid imagination and luminous writing compensate for too-easy epiphanies.
From acclaimed novelist Hegi (The Vision of Emma Blau, 2000, etc.), 11 short stories: finely wrought fables with transcendent resolutions rather than the usual open-ended contemporary slices of life.
Using backdrops that range from Mexico to Germany, Hegi places her characters, who are seeking outcomes of one kind or another, in situations where they can find them. In the title story, a young seminarian with doubts about his calling finds fulfillment helping a recently widowed aunt renovate the family hotel (located near a shrine) so that each room’s décor reflects a particular saint. Another notable entry, “A Woman’s Perfume,” depicts a teenaged girl, on holiday in Venice with her recently divorced father, who learns the disturbing difference between pure romantic love and sensual desire when she’s befriended by an older woman and her music-loving but sexually chaste husband. In other distinguished stories, an elderly and terminally ill German woman carefully plans her suicide by drowning in Mexico (“Freitod”); a man fishing for marlin off the Baja realizes, as he frees a fish whose colors are more radiant than ever, that he cannot hold on to the wife who recently left him (“For Their Own Survival”); a mentally retarded boy heals a family rift in postwar Germany when he tries to help an uncle paint the fence that divides the warring relatives (“A Town Like Ours”); and watching a juggler joyfully plying his risk-taking trade enables a worried mother to appreciate her daughter’s courage in falling in love with a blind man (“The Juggler”). The least successful piece is the uneven, overlong “Lower Crossing,” in which a middle-aged woman living on the Spokane River with her sister understands when they must put their old dog to sleep “that what nurtures us will also sustain us at times of pain.”
A vivid imagination and luminous writing compensate for too-easy epiphanies.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-84310-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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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