A debut collection from Miami Herald reporter Menéndez: interconnected stories about Cuban exiles’ feelings of displacement in Miami. In “In Cuba,” four elderly men, two Cuban and two Dominican, meet in a Miami park to play dominoes. As the Cuban Máximo tells his jokes and chafes at the stares of tourists, the narrative of the long Cuban odyssey unfolds, resulting in an exile both angry and poignant with longing. Menéndez captures the weight of these forced exiles’ frustrations and misbegotten dreams—the dreams of middle-class and professional Cubans whose lives are haunted by the fear that they may lose, indeed may have lost, the memory of what life was like back in Cuba. By the time she reaches the last story, Menéndez is conjuring up Eugene O’Neill–like drama. “Her Mother’s House” concerns a journalist who returns to Cuba and tracks down the house that’s the source of her mother’s nostalgic suffering. The journey finally forces the daughter to let go of those dreams and the losses they have wrought to try once again to clear the slate. The opening (title) story, which was included in the Best New American Voices 2000, and the closing tale frame a certain number of pieces that are considerably weaker. Menéndez’s stronger moments, nevertheless, allow her to make the Cuban exile ordeal come alive and pluck the chord of universal feeling. A pointed rendering of the human need to idealize what was in order to live with what is.
Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8021-1688-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2001
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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