A powerful argument against selflessness, a treat for fans and a grand introduction for those new to the author’s curious...
A welcome showcase of short (or shortish) fiction by quirky comic master Self (Liver: A Fictional Organ with a Surface Anatomy of Four Lobes, 2009, etc.).
Eccentric and learned, Self, as Rick Moody points out in his introduction, is a keen student of language, adept at switching registers from East End Cockney to Sloane aspiration and Oxbridge pomposity. Indeed, it seems safe to say that not since Dickens has any English writer been so interested in English sounds and the improbabilities of English orthography, whence one setting called Inwardleigh and another somewhere along the “Edgware Road/Maida Vale hinterland.” Of course, Dickens would not have imagined a post-Kafkaesque correspondence between the bugs and other creepy-crawlies that dwell in a Suffolk cottage and its hapless owner: As they inform him, they don’t have much of a choice in the matter in this grim world, but instead enter “because in the normal course of things there is usually some carrion within which we can deposit our eggs,” to say nothing of the cleaning services they offer in this “flytopia.” Self sometimes operates on the edge of science fiction, but in a J.G. Ballard sort of way; he may write of “emotos” and “procros,” but at the same time he is interested in the all-too-human, in “vast vaginas” and acne so florid as to recall the “Grand Canyon at sunset.” Though seldom meta or self-referential, many an aspiring writer will recognize corners of Self’s imagined worlds, as when he puts one earnest creative-writing instructor inside a prison (“they may have all been sex offenders, but despite that they managed to exemplify the three commonest types of wannabe writer”) and proposes a new genre of writing called Motorway Verse, helped along by lashings of “kaolin and morphine.” Each story is a pleasure, and most are occasions to head to the dictionary or encyclopedia and learn a thing or two.
A powerful argument against selflessness, a treat for fans and a grand introduction for those new to the author’s curious view of the universe.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-59691-297-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
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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