Available only for the last five years in Russia itself, a searing document, worthy of shelving alongside Solzhenitsyn.
Sharply observed stories, from the thin line between autobiography and fiction, of life inside the Gulag.
Shalamov (1907-82) sympathized with Trotsky, and his father had been an Orthodox priest. For both sins, he was packed off to the mines of Kolyma, in the far northeastern corner of Russia. In the decades after his servitude, like many former prisoners, writes the translator in his introduction, “Shalamov…stuck to the principle of speaking as little as possible, and never when a third person (who might be an informant) was present.” Nevertheless, he quietly wrote thousands of pages, in some of which he recounted what he had learned from the Gulag: “I realized that one can live on anger,” he wrote, and then, “I realized that one can live on indifference.” In the stories, people live on whatever they can to keep them going in the cold, darkness, and hunger of the camps. One prisoner recounts that he and his fellow inmates had figured out a way to beat the system so that they would not receive “punishment rations,” helped along by the fact that “the guard was a softie: he knew, of course.” Other guards in Shalamov’s pages are harder, but all are implicated in a system in which they, too, can easily become prisoners themselves; so it is when one persecuting Soviet officer crosses wits with a lawyer and winds up falling afoul of his bosses. “He didn’t torment working people,” says another inmate to the lawyer, Andreyev, adding, “It’s because of you, people like you, that we get put in prison.” Assuring us that everything here happened, if veiled and restructured for narrative purposes, Shalamov recounts his transition to work as a paramedic, taught by a famous surgeon who had the bad luck to be related by marriage to a disgraced former Bolshevik. His long cycle of stories ends with his return to Moscow after almost 17 years: “I had come back from hell.”
Available only for the last five years in Russia itself, a searing document, worthy of shelving alongside Solzhenitsyn.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68137-214-3
Page Count: 776
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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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