The seventh collection of Singer's short stories, again centered on the lives of Yiddish-speaking Polish Jews in Europe and the Americas before and after the holocaust—but here the "whims and passions" which destroy, illuminate, and possess a life, often slip into a supernatural dimension. "Everything can become a passion—even serving God." There are demonic appearances: two witch-like sisters, oddly complementary in temperament, lie in silence as an Evil One approaches their lover in the night; a monstrous, ugly schoolgirl, mad with desire, takes the place of one man's beautiful, selfish dead wife; there is even a howling heifer which echoes the yearning within the heart of a young man. In "Old Love" an elderly man recaptures desire while the woman he would marry commits suicide to join her dead husband—and her death leaves a rich, sensuous sadness and a wonder about why a man is born and why he dies. In "A Sabbath in Portugal" the narrator, invited to a home of Marranos (Jews forced to convert to Christianity), is flooded with remembered Sabbath peace and reunited with a dead beloved. "The Pair" tells of two brilliant but demented sojourners who live within each other's outsized image. Through the twenty stories Singer continues to evolve his characters with the sustained scrutiny of kinship and a candlelit intimacy. Physical presences, speech and circumstances flicker into being as sharply as that cosmic instant in each tale—when a suprareality abruptly becomes as real as a Miami balcony or a winter road in rural Poland. Many of these stories have appeared in the New Yorker.
Pub Date: Oct. 6, 1975
ISBN: 0374529116
Page Count: 326
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1975
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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