Uneven work. But when Mo Yan’s imagination cuts loose, and the gloves come off, he can be a provocative and powerfully...
A mixed-bag collection of frequently abrasive, imaginative stories written in the 1980s and ’90s by the highly visible Chinese author (Red Sorghum, 1993; The Republic of Wine, 2000).
“Mo Yan” is a nom de plume that translates literally as “Don’t Speak”—a curious fact revealed in its bearer’s somewhat smug Preface (“Hunger and Loneliness: My Muses”), which summarizes the facts of his career and identifies the impulse behind his work as “a yearning for the good life by a lonely child afraid of going hungry.” Those concerns are dramatized directly in “Abandoned Child,” whose writer-narrator describes his rescue of a baby girl found in a sunflower field as an act of humanity reviled by a society that values only sons, seeing female children as no more than worthless mouths to feed. The story begins intriguingly, but lapses into excessive commentary—a mistake avoided in such stark parabolic tales as “Iron Child,” about the dietary extremities to which neglected children of exhausted railroad workers are driven; and “The Cure,” a ghastly revelation of how impoverished villagers forced to witness executions of “traitors to the Party” recycle the corpses thus provided. Mo Yan is in fact least effective when most conventional, as in tales depicting an adolescent “Love Story” occurring in a commune and an old man’s bitter memory of his failure to grasp the love offered him years earlier (“Shen Garden”). The standouts here, conversely, are a wickedly imaginative look at the horror of arranged marriage (“Soaring”); a fable of national pride and ethnic hatred embedded in the tale of a Chinese soldier’s ordeal of survival (“Man and Beast”); and the marvelous title piece, in which an elderly factory worker, laid off just prior to his retirement, achieves both prosperity and unexpected complications by converting an abandoned bus into a “love cottage” he then rents to couples seeking privacy.
Uneven work. But when Mo Yan’s imagination cuts loose, and the gloves come off, he can be a provocative and powerfully original writer.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-55970-565-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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