Much-honored Chilean author Coloane (1910–2002) captures the geographical and psychological extremity of his native grounds...
Nine tales of greed and hardship set in the harsh, unforgiving landscape of southern Chile’s islands.
The premier story, also the longest, is the title work, a bleak examination of how the discovery of gold turns prospectors into grasping sinners for whom too much is not enough. The moral dilemma is summed up as the two soldiers-turned-prospectors, Novak and Schaeffer, are about to part. “Look after the bag [of gold],” Novak warns, “it’s all you have in life!” “It is life” Schaeffer composedly responds; certainly the characters act as though it is. In “The Lighthouse Builder,” construction worker Vladimir brings his wife Ana to the desolate land and, not surprisingly, finds her coveted by others. Esteban, a young man exiled by his family, winds up living with the couple and makes a clumsy, ill-advised move on Ana. She tells her husband, but rather than being outraged, Vladimir is amused that this puny youngster dared to accost his wife. He delights in coming home after a day at the construction site to torment Esteban with humiliating questions: “And how goes it today? Did you or didn’t you? How was it? Did you get the treasure?” Humor and tragedy coexist in these tales redolent of the sea, but tragedy often wins out. Men who come ashore to bury a comrade who died at sea get distracted at a local tavern and leave the body to be covered by snow (“Five Sailors and a Green Coffin”). A malicious horse-breaker makes sure that the company accountant gets an untamable animal, and the predictable rapidly becomes the inevitable: The horse throws the rider, who develops hallucinations and loses track of time (“On the Horse of Dawn”). A ship’s cook “adopts” a lamb and later kills the sailor who threw it overboard (“Passage to Puerto Edén”).
Much-honored Chilean author Coloane (1910–2002) captures the geographical and psychological extremity of his native grounds in beautiful language, well translated by Curtis.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-933372-63-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
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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