Surrealistic distortions of the phenomena of cultural displacement and alienation dominate this elegant new collection of stories by the Japanese author of The Bridegroom Was a Dog (1998). Tawada, who writes both in her native language and in German (and has won literary prizes in both Japan and Germany), concentrates on the delusive nature of solitariness as felt by a woman interpreter in Germany possessed by the ghost of a suicide (in “The Bath”), and another woman (in “A Guest”) whose visit to her “ear doctor” initiates a series of bizarre adventures during which she effectively disappears into her own imaginings. The similarities of Tawada’s dreamlike fables to Borges’s elusive “ficciones” is even more pronounced in the compound title story: here, ordinary objects (like earrings) and experiences (e.g., looking in mirrors, learning a new language) are explored with a scrupulous intensity that subtly reveals their inherent illogic and mystery.
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2002
ISBN: 0-8112-1515-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The thirty-one stories of the late Flannery O'Connor, collected for the first time. In addition to the nineteen stories gathered in her lifetime in Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965) and A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955) there are twelve previously published here and there. Flannery O'Connor's last story, "The Geranium," is a rewritten version of the first which appears here, submitted in 1947 for her master's thesis at the State University of Iowa.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1971
ISBN: 0374515360
Page Count: 555
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1971
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
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