Upadhyay's plain prose makes the political crisis all the more affecting.
Familial responsibility butts up against personal desires in these finely crafted stories.
Novelist and short story writer Upadhyay (The Guru of Love, 2003) assembles another fine collection of complex, haunting pieces set in Nepal. The title story juxtaposes the shocking news that Crown Prince Dipendra has shot himself after killing the entire royal family, with the relationship of taxi driver Ganga, who belatedly realizes that his brother Dharma is homosexual. In “The Wedding Hero,” a friendship between three bank workers is strained when two of the trio realize they're both attracted to the lovely Gauri; things backfire when Umesh decides to arrange and finance a coworker's wedding, in an attempt to impress Gauri. In “The Third Stage,” a retired film actor agrees to take part in a feature film to placate his wife and daughter—and realizes that the fantasy world of film is akin to the earthly, illusory world. The importance of family—and the heartbreak that can be found within—is described in “Father, Daughter,” in which a daughter's willful actions challenge a father's notions of caste. In “The Weight of a Gun,” the divorced mother of a grown schizophrenic son unexpectedly finds herself raising her ex-husband's newborn. And a junior accountant comes to realize that spectacular good looks are not necessarily the only thing to look for in a bride, in “Chintamani's Women.” Characters not only maneuver their way through the intricacies of love, but also navigate against the backdrop of Nepal's Maoist guerrillas, fighters who have been orchestrating a nearly decade-long civil war.
Upadhyay's plain prose makes the political crisis all the more affecting.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2006
ISBN: 0-618-51749-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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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