An uneven set of tales but one with plenty of bright spots.
This debut collection of short fiction by Klym, a former professional ballet dancer, explores the lives of expert and novice dancers to reveal how the art form channels the power of self-expression.
In a brief introduction, the author describes his background as a dancer (he studied at New York City’s School of American Ballet) and tries to articulate how dancing and composing stories intersect for him: “When I write, I dance,” he states. He describes the relationship between writer and reader as a partnership—one that’s aided by growing familiarity. In “The Ballet Class,” an amateur ballerina in her 40s observes that her classmates are a motley but lovable crew. In “The Belly Dance,” Karla, a woman faced with a stalled marriage, turns to a belly dancing class, which teaches her the moves that she needs to spark a new sexual rapport with her husband. As a writer, Klym is clearly drawn to formal variance; as a result, these stories feature braided narratives, bulleted lists, step-by-step guides, a faux product disclaimer, and a dessert recipe. The author also freely uses section titles, which provide crisp packaging for vignettes that, read quickly, create a sense of swift movement through time and theme. The story “Pavlova,” for instance, unfolds in newspaper clippings, diary entries, and a mysterious, aforementioned recipe to tell the story of a dessert dish so potent that it summons the ghost of its namesake—legendary Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova—and physically transforms any dancer who eats it. Klym has an accomplished command of narrative voice. In “A Professional Male Ballet Dancer in Twelve Steps,” he succinctly captures the tone and diction of a child: “your parents took the leaves you collected and ironed them between pieces of waxed paper. You said you loved the smell.” The book runs into trouble with its dialogue, however, which is often too wooden and prosaic to seem believable: “You put body, mind, and soul into the entire process,” Karla’s husband in “The Belly Dance” says, “but cooking and eating are not the same thing as loving.” The author’s clear passion for dance enlivens the 15 tales, but he sometimes bends over backward to coin a new phrase that expresses its importance, as in the story “Origin”: “A state of eloquence encased in a spark of spontaneity, Dance set the world in motion.” Klym frequently mentions the difficulties that dancers face, such as stereotypes regarding sexuality, problems of body image, and the physical and mental tolls of performance and training. Despite this, some of the stories here lack any tension at all. In “The Ballet Class,” for instance, the climax occurs when a character’s ex-girlfriend unexpectedly shows up, but the end still fizzles. In “The Belly Dance,” Karla lies in order to join a class for pregnant women, but this complication never transforms into something interesting. And “Origin,” a creation myth of cartoonish grandiosity, never allows readers to access the emotion at its core.
An uneven set of tales but one with plenty of bright spots.Pub Date: June 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-60489-224-6
Page Count: 198
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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