"Look at all this stuff I've got in my head: rockets and Venetian churches, David Bowie and Diderot, nuoc roam and Big Macs, sunglasses and orgasms." With all that stuff in her formidable head—and her essay-ish turn of mind—Sontag's fiction isn't going to be like anyone else's; and it certainly isn't going to be for everyone. But these eight stories, written between 1963 and 1977 for such diverse journals as Partisan Review, The New Yorker, and Playboy, are fascinatingly varied, often delightful in their darkly ironic twists, and only occasionally unworthy of the reader effort required. Paradoxically, the two weakest stories are the easiest and the most difficult. "The Dummy" (1963) is neat—fed-up commuter has himself replaced by a robot with a heart of its own—but Roald Dahl would have done it just as well, without the themes sitting on top. Opaque "Dr. Jekyll" also dances its ideas on our heads—about energy, freedom, evil, karma?—and, despite amusing lines and arresting images, Sontag is outshone by Donald Barthelme at this business of juxtaposing legendary echoes with contemporary banalities. But in the other stories, there's naked pain lurking—deflected, straight to the heart sometimes, by whichever oblique format Sontag is using. "Project for a Trip to China" is wild free association on matters Chinese (multiple-choice questions, lists, gags), yet there's an autobiographical panic running through it, like a rat in a maze. "Baby" is the surreal record of a couple consulting a psychiatrist for help with their mad, bad child—a panorama of parental anxiety that throws out chronological order and leaves the psychiatrist's queries to the imagination. In the recent, feverish "Unguided Tour," the pain (seeing beautiful things abroad doesn't help) is perhaps not deflected quite enough, while the allegorical markings in "American Spirits" may go too far in keeping ironic distance. However, "Debriefing," a gallery of despair, Manhattan-style, successfully mixes autobiographical immediacy with social essaying. And in "Old Complaints Revisited," when a Party member quits, offering a farcically complete catalogue of what it means to belong to the Party, a personal scream comes snaking up out of all that essayistic stuffing. Wiry, allusive, and too smart for their own good—read them anyway.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1978
ISBN: 0312420102
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1978
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
BOOK REVIEW
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