Richly varied and moving fiction: the work of a little-known writer who deserves to be remembered.
Family obligation and religious and political allegiance: such are the dominant themes in this first English-language collection of the work of the late (1934–81) Israeli author.
Best known for his autobiographical novels Past Continuous (1984) and Past Perfect (1987), Shabtai was an exquisite stylist equally adept at brief vignettes resonant with implied emotion and ampler narratives that wrest drama from carefully developed characterizations. The best of these 14 gemlike miniatures (several of which feature the same unidentified omniscient narrator) include a boy’s memory of growing up terrorized by his insanely pious grandfather (“Adoshem”); the meeting of an elderly widow and widower, each of whom expects the other to be the one to offer “A Marriage Proposal”; a mother’s vigil at the bedside of her son, the possessor of an angelic tenor voice, who’s now dying of AIDS (“Twilight”); and a grandson’s account (“Departure”) of the passing of his beloved grandmother, “Little by little . . . . Like a strip of brown land, receding from the eyes of the travelers on a ship . . . . ” Of the longer stories, “Cordoba” doesn’t do enough with the relationship between an Israeli architect touring Spain and the virginal American girl to whom he’s attracted; but “Uncle Shmuel” offers an appealing portrayal of an ebullient, distractingly ambitious jack-of-all trades. And Shabtai strikes deeper in the compact tale (“The Voyage to Mauritius”) of a socialist atheist whose Job-like travail and arduous passage (during WWII) to the new country of Israel purifies and ennobles him. Shabtai’s versatility is shown by the picaresque tale of a resourceful hustler noted for his ingenious moneymaking schemes (“A Private and Very Awesome Leopard”) and the unusual title story, which details a passionate Communist’s obsession with the unstable woman “revolutionary” who loves, leaves, and unmans him.
Richly varied and moving fiction: the work of a little-known writer who deserves to be remembered.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2004
ISBN: 1-58567-340-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
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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