Writing fiction connecting Scotland and South Africa presents a challenge, but Wicomb makes both worlds her own.
Elliptical stories about the complexities of race, class, gender, generation and geography.
A native South African who now lives and teaches in Scotland, Wicomb (Playing in the Light, 2006, etc.) employs both Cape Town and Glasgow as settings, most often both in the same tale. She opens with “Boy in a jute-sack hood,” a short but densely packed stream-of-consciousness narrative by an academic who has transplanted himself from his native Scotland to South Africa. Having just finished a book after his wife (or lover) has left him, he seems to live mainly inside his head, until a chance encounter with a worker’s son renews a spark of social engagement. “Disgrace” depicts the awkward relationship between Grace, a 74-year-old South African cleaning woman, and a visiting Scottish poet and anti-apartheid activist. The collection takes a metafictional turn with “The one that got away,” about a Scottish-born conceptual artist and his no-nonsense South African bride on what passes for a honeymoon in Glasgow; ultimately, Wicomb has her male protagonist commenting on his portrayal in the fiction. The same couple returns in “There’s the bird that never flew,” in which the artist offers his wife some advice that might provide a key to appreciating these stories: “There is nothing to it, nothing arcane about looking at art. It’s just about giving it time, attention, looking carefully, because if you can describe a work accurately, you’re more than halfway towards understanding what’s going on.” Most of the stories find a character translating experience from one culture to another, both cultures likely foreign to the reader, who must decipher patois such as dronklap, bredie and verskrik from context. The author plunges the reader into the middle of each, letting the stories and characters reveal themselves as they proceed.
Writing fiction connecting Scotland and South Africa presents a challenge, but Wicomb makes both worlds her own.Pub Date: June 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59558-457-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2009
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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