Straight talk and dark fantasy from an underappreciated corner of North America.
An eclectic mix of stories, sometimes irreverent and occasionally scarifying, about First Nations peoples in northern Canada.
“Super Indians,” one of the strongest stories in this collection from the veteran Van Camp (Kiss by Kiss, 2018, etc.), has the wisecracking attitude of early Sherman Alexie, as its young narrator bemoans how the tribal leader, Chief Danny, siphons funds and keeps the community stuck in a rut. (“I would spend my life uncolonizing Chief Danny…save the North from him and every other loser leader out there.”) Similarly, in “Man Babies,” a man attempts to deliver some tough love to his new girlfriend’s layabout son, who’s proving that “our warriors will remain couch potatoes. That our languages and customs will die.” Van Camp can tweak this approach to make it more compassionate, as in “The Promise,” in which two boys practice pro-wrestling moves on each other to help cope with their fathers' absences. Or he can reshape it into bleak horror, as in a pair of stories in which global warming unleashes an army of demons called the Wheetago; our neglect of the environment dooms us to having our “heads like chalices served up as offerings, full of brains mixed with blackberries.” Those two stories aside, Van Camp is mainly concerned with everyday lives in the region where he grew up in the Northwest Territories, and he can give everyday experience a Thurber-esque charm, as in “Ehtsèe/Grandpa,” in which the narrator attempts to connect with his grandparents in absurd or ill-advised ways (watching E.T. with grandpa, getting both of them stoned). The lack of an overall consistent tone can make the collection feel centerless, but Van Camp seems capable of bringing glints of humor to nearly every predicament, be it world-ending or just day-wrecking.
Straight talk and dark fantasy from an underappreciated corner of North America.Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-77162-216-5
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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
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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