Formative work by an author who would later revisit what’s best in these stories through longer and more ambitious fiction.
First American publication of a collection of very early, very short stories by the Irish master of the literary novel.
Since a slightly different version of this volume was issued in Britain in 1970, Banville has earned much greater renown as a prize-winning novelist (The Sea, 2005, etc.) and has subsequently won a popular readership through a series of detective novels as Benjamin Black (Christine Falls, 2007, etc.). The seeds of both branches of his fiction can be found in these elliptical, elemental stories. Though there are only hints of the more lyrical prose that would subsequently dazzle admirers (while seeming overwritten to detractors), the sea and the solitude it affords were plainly a preoccupation early on. And there’s some mystery at the heart of practically every one of these stories—an unexplained relationship or situation, an inscrutable murder (in more than one story), a dilemma not completely understood yet requiring escape. The Banville of his early 20s could write dialogue like this from “Lovers”: “We’ll be free. We’re young and the world is wide. We’ll be free.” Yet he already knows that such freedom is an illusion, an empty promise. And more often, his characters find themselves lamenting the passing of old ways, such as the stranger who seems oddly familiar to a son mourning his father in “A Death”: “There is a new brand of despair in the world. The old ways are dying, and the old religion too. When people turn their backs on God what can they expect?” Other stories have similarly elemental titles—“Sanctuary,” “Summer Voices,” “Island”—and similar obsessions with transition and loss. “Look it at,” says the drunken host at a party of friends he doesn’t like. “The new Ireland. Sitting around at the end of a party wondering why we’re not happy. Trying to find what it is we’ve lost.”
Formative work by an author who would later revisit what’s best in these stories through longer and more ambitious fiction.Pub Date: July 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-345-80706-9
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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