Like the book’s excellent introduction, which teases a reader to want to know more about this woman’s life, these...
These short stories of Russian peasants, artists and lovers show few signs of their age and much that is timeless.
Teffi, pen name of Nadezhda Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya (1872-1952), was born in pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg and began publishing satirical articles in 1904, then mostly stories by 1911. The fiction collected here ranges from droll sketches to busy, deceptively simple human comedies and complex psychological excursions. A woman in “The Hat” tries on her old and new hats so often she leaves for a date—with a poet who has written no poetry—wearing the wrong one. In “Duty and Honour,” a woman follows a stern friend’s advice for ending an affair yet continues it by deleting a crucial “not” in her Dear John letter. In the autobiographical “Rasputin,” history and betrayal intertwine as writers gather for a dinner where one of them refuses a tryst with the great man. “The Quiet Backwater” is one of several stories that show how Teffi enriched what formerly might have been feuilletons. An old couple shares an estate’s ramshackle lodge and an understanding about a child born while he was away fighting; and the translation offers a luminous moment: “Softly rustle the reeds forgotten by the river.” History gets touched on again, lightly and darkly, in “Petrograd Monologue,” a story about food shortages during revolutionary times in which some make flatbread from face powder or window putty. The death of a sot lets the writer move slyly through the floors of his building cataloging the masks of solemnity placed over faces of scorn and indifference. Teffi’s grasp of a child’s tender sensibility is remarkable in “The Lifeless Beast,” as is her feeling for the range of love’s inner torments in “Thy Will.”
Like the book’s excellent introduction, which teases a reader to want to know more about this woman’s life, these wide-ranging, brief works whet an appetite for more of her fiction.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-78227-037-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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
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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