A diminutive book that speaks volumes about “the ghostly existence of émigrés,” one that haunts the reader’s imagination.
The legacy of world war and the experience of exile provide a rich texture of loss and longing in nine stories from a prominent Argentinean-born filmmaker and author.
Cozarinsky’s second collection (after Urban Voodoo, 1990) is bracketed by two masterpieces, beginning with the unusual title story, about a young Jew, in 1890, preparing to embark for Buenos Aires to await his reluctant bride-to-be’s later arrival—only to be accompanied instead by the non-Jewish woman who impulsively begs to become his “wife.” In the haunting final story, “Émigré Hotel,” a Jewish protagonist travels from Argentina to Lisbon, obsessed by the story of his grandparents having fallen in love there in 1940—only to learn more than he wishes to know about his family’s angry, tangled history. The plot similarity that links these two pieces comes as a dazzling, moving surprise as deracinated characters also figure in the poignant “Christmas ’54,” about a Viennese writer in South America who relieves his loneliness by hiring “aimless, hungry-looking young men” for sex; and also in the portrayal of a Berlin pianist who can’t live either in his native or his adopted culture (“Days of 1937”); and in “Budapest,” about an itinerant art forger whose memories of his mother’s Romanian youth and adulthood dissuade him from fleecing an elderly “victim” of the Nazis’ appropriation of Europe’s artistic treasures. And yet even stronger is the masterly “Literature,” whose narrator pays belated homage to the Russian émigré woman who’d introduced him to her country’s great writers while grieving for her brother, perished at Dachau. This deceptively simple Chekhovian story resonates thunderously, most notably in one of contemporary fiction’s indelibly memorable images: “. . . although there were no trees in the camp, the ground was strewn with yellow leaves.” The “leaves” are, of course, the cloth stars worn by Jewish prisoners.
A diminutive book that speaks volumes about “the ghostly existence of émigrés,” one that haunts the reader’s imagination.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-374-11673-3
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
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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