This first volume of a planned two-volume collection could almost serve as a primer on old-fashioned Italian short fiction. Ortese (The Iguana, 1987) drifts from one dreamlike subject to the next in these cerebral and enjoyable stories, most related in the same educated, uninvolved first-person voice. The narrator of ``The Submerged Continent'' describes a wealthy family from Naples with three daughters who may or may not be real. ``Torture'' has no characters per se, but it's a startlingly clinical examination of romantic love and the havoc that it wreaks. In ``Donat'' the narrator sits in a dingy room at six o'clock and dreams of seeing a man named Donat in a bar at six o'clock, only to have Donat say that he too has dreamed of seeing the narrator in the bar at six o'clock some time in the future. ``The Ombras'' takes its name from a family—whose surname means ``shadow''—whom the narrator visits, only to glimpse them gathered around the bed of a young girl with a black and swollen body. In ``The Tenant'' the narrator's grandmother shares her room with an angel named Mr. Lin, who eventually grows wings and leaves. ``Moonlight on the Wall'' follows a pregnant woman who is suddenly finding joy in ``the mysterious beauty of being alive,'' even though she is convinced that few people appreciate her. ``The House in the Woods'' is the lengthiest and least successful of these stories. Its narrator lives with Trude, whom she describes as ``the bruised and swollen side of one's own soul,'' and there is an odd incident with two men who are either plumbers or thieves or something else altogether, but Ortese has played the same tricks in a smaller space in the earlier pieces, so this time around they seem elaborately elongated. Interesting, but with a strangeness that sometimes becomes predictable.
Pub Date: June 17, 1994
ISBN: 0-929701-39-9
Page Count: 160
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1994
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
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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