Di Benedetto’s view of the world is gloomy, his writing precise and poetic. It’s a winning combination.
Collection of stories by the newly rediscovered Argentinean writer Di Benedetto (1922-86), who blends the fantastic sensibilities of Borges and Kafka with the profound pessimism of Dostoyevsky.
A father, wealthy and disconnected, brings a palm tree to his estate and a monkey to go along with it. The monkey takes refuge in the tree and “only came down to scrounge or eat whatever food some kindly soul laid out at the foot of his dwelling.” The man’s son reckons that although he doesn’t have a palm tree to call his own, he is a monkey himself—and moreover, one who has made in the palm tree of his mind room for a whole flock of “blissful sparrows, canaries, and partridges.” So goes the title story, taken from Di Benedetto's first collection, Animal World, published in 1953. Later collections shed animal metaphors for more straightforward depictions of people who are unfailingly put upon, men and women who talk past one another in landscapes of “withered leaves gone brown, soon to rot,” who venture into the mosquito-infested jungle for no good reason except to satisfy the hunger of the inhabitants: “if those tiny beasts had a soul and their souls were inclined to vengeance,” thinks the adventurous journalist at the center of the beguiling story “Orthopterans,” from a collection published in 1983, “they will feed on me as soon as I fall still.” So they do. One of the most memorable stories here involves a Bartleby-like refusal on the part of an itinerant gaucho to take work that does not suit his dignity, an identification with the oppressed that explains why Di Benedetto should have run afoul of Argentina’s military junta in the 1970s—but that does not explain why his work should have been overlooked for so long, a gap this collection of short fiction helps remedy.
Di Benedetto’s view of the world is gloomy, his writing precise and poetic. It’s a winning combination.Pub Date: May 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-914671-72-5
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Archipelago
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
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
Carefully worked tales that are as good as many and better than most.
A first collection from Irish-born Keegan spans the Atlantic, touching down in rural Ireland and the southern US—with results often familiar or stretched-for, yet deftly done and alluringly readable.
In the title story, a happily married woman wants to find out what it’s like to have sex with someone else—and does so indeed, in a psychological clunker that crosses Hitchcock with O. Henry while remaining ever-intriguing to the eye. A near-wizardry of language and detail, too, closes the volume, with “The Ginger Rogers Sermon,” when a pubescent girl in Ireland, sexually curious, brings about the suicide of a hulking lumberman in a tone-perfect but morally inert story. In between are longer and shorter, greater and lesser tales. Among the better are “Men and Women,” about a suffering Irish farmwife who at last rebels against a cruelly domineering husband; the southern-set “Ride If You Dare,” about a couple who shyly meet after running personals ads; and “Stay Close to the Water’s Edge,” about a Harvard student who despises—and is despised by—his millionaire stepfather. Psychologically more thin or commonplace are “Storms,” told by an Irish daughter whose mother went mad; “Where the Water’s Deepest,” a snippet about an au pair afraid of “losing” her charge; or “The Singing Cashier”—based on fact, we’re rather pointlessly told—about a couple who, unbeknownst to their neighbors, commit “hideous acts on teenage girls.” Keegan’s best include the more maturely conceived “Passport Soup,” about a man devoured by guilt and grief after his daughter goes missing while in his care; “Quare Name for a Boy,” in which a young woman, pregnant by a single-fling boyfriend whom she no longer has an interest in, determines that she’ll go on into motherhood without him; and the nicely sustained “Sisters”—one dutiful and plain, the other lovely and self-indulgent—who come to a symbolically perfect end.
Carefully worked tales that are as good as many and better than most.Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-87113-779-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
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