A versatile writer struggles to find his voice in this scattershot collection.
This debut by a British writer, touted as a novel, is in fact a collection of 10 linked stories, the link being an imaginary city. What kind of city? One that’s fearful and divided against itself.
In the title story, two young men, immigrants, are closely monitored after their arrival. The fear is that they might have dealings with the Cynics, vicious pranksters who terrorize commuters, or the so-called monsters, ostracized vagrants with hearts of gold. The class divisions are stark in "The Song of Serelight Fair." A poor rickshaw puller is taken in by a rich girl, who buys him a guitar and encourages his songwriting, all the while manipulating him. These are broad strokes. They establish a framework but little else. One story ("Three Translations") has a fascinating reference to a city ritual, a festival for its unmarried men, but fails to exploit it. There is also a boogeyman loose in the city’s gritty neighborhoods. Sometimes he’s a serial killer, as in "Good Slaughter," the collection’s dramatic high point. Elsewhere, in "The Rose Tree" and "A Way to Leave," which rework the same material, he’s a pitiful thing with a secret so terrible that, once heard, it will turn one into a zombie. Both stories lean heavily on innuendo, as does "Outside the Days," in which a young libertine, a contemporary Dorian Gray, falls into a pit of depravity. “I’d be more specific if I could,” says the narrator lamely. Two others inhabit rarefied worlds with literary echoes. "Gallathea" turns the world of a private investigator inside out; it’s served with a big dollop of Chandler, a splash of Burgess and a twist of classical mythology. In "The Significant City of Lazarus Glass," an investigator-turned–criminal mastermind battles four former colleagues; it’s an elaborate spoof of Holmes-ian deductive techniques.
A versatile writer struggles to find his voice in this scattershot collection.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-62040-165-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
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
Visionary speculative stories that will change the way readers see themselves and the world around them: This book delivers...
Exploring humankind's place in the universe and the nature of humanity, many of the stories in this stellar collection focus on how technological advances can impact humanity’s evolutionary journey.
Chiang's (Stories of Your Life and Others, 2002) second collection begins with an instant classic, “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” which won Hugo and Nebula awards for Best Novelette in 2008. A time-travel fantasy set largely in ancient Baghdad, the story follows fabric merchant Fuwaad ibn Abbas after he meets an alchemist who has crafted what is essentially a time portal. After hearing life-changing stories about others who have used the portal, he decides to go back in time to try to right a terrible wrong—and realizes, too late, that nothing can erase the past. Other standout selections include “The Lifecycle of Software Objects,” a story about a software tester who, over the course of a decade, struggles to keep a sentient digital entity alive; “The Great Silence,” which brilliantly questions the theory that humankind is the only intelligent race in the universe; and “Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny,” which chronicles the consequences of machines raising human children. But arguably the most profound story is "Exhalation" (which won the 2009 Hugo Award for Best Short Story), a heart-rending message and warning from a scientist of a highly advanced, but now extinct, race of mechanical beings from another universe. Although the being theorizes that all life will die when the universes reach “equilibrium,” its parting advice will resonate with everyone: “Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so.”
Visionary speculative stories that will change the way readers see themselves and the world around them: This book delivers in a big way.Pub Date: May 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-101-94788-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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