Small offerings from a master. Like Faulkner, Giono takes us into an unpleasant world shot through with strange and...
Twenty stories in a first English translation, by the celebrated French novelist (Second Harvest, 1999, etc.), with an introduction by Henry Miller, in his day a fierce admirer.
Provence-born Giono (1895–1970) is probably best known in the US for his story “The Baker’s Wife,” made into a film in the 1930s. Although most of the pieces here, first published in France in 1932, are set in the hamlets and countryside of Provence, they bring us into a world that is dark, spiteful, and lugubrious: a world of hard-hearted peasants bent on squeezing the life out of their neighbors much as they squeeze oil from their olives. In the title story, for example, two starving vagrants climb down into a dangerously ramshackle well to repair a parish priest’s water pump—only to be reimbursed with less money than it cost them to take the bus to his village. The poor farmer of “Fields” allows his wife to take in a boarder to make ends meet—and soon discovers that the man is her lover. The blind beggar of “The Hand” describes how he lost his sight inexplicably during a religious procession when he was 20—and how afterwards the village girls would grab his hand unexpectedly and place it down their blouses. In “Annette, or A Family Affair,” an old man who years earlier had allowed his niece to be sent to an orphanage when her parents died makes a point of going to visit the man who has hired her to work in his shop—so as to warn him that she grew up among bad characters and may be dishonest. Even the father of the bride is unable to work up much in the way of generosity: In “Philemon,” a man makes his daughter slaughter one of his pigs on the way to her own marriage.
Small offerings from a master. Like Faulkner, Giono takes us into an unpleasant world shot through with strange and unexpected beauty.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2002
ISBN: 1-58322-524-2
Page Count: 171
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002
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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