Richly varied and moving fiction: the work of a little-known writer who deserves to be remembered.
Family obligation and religious and political allegiance: such are the dominant themes in this first English-language collection of the work of the late (1934–81) Israeli author.
Best known for his autobiographical novels Past Continuous (1984) and Past Perfect (1987), Shabtai was an exquisite stylist equally adept at brief vignettes resonant with implied emotion and ampler narratives that wrest drama from carefully developed characterizations. The best of these 14 gemlike miniatures (several of which feature the same unidentified omniscient narrator) include a boy’s memory of growing up terrorized by his insanely pious grandfather (“Adoshem”); the meeting of an elderly widow and widower, each of whom expects the other to be the one to offer “A Marriage Proposal”; a mother’s vigil at the bedside of her son, the possessor of an angelic tenor voice, who’s now dying of AIDS (“Twilight”); and a grandson’s account (“Departure”) of the passing of his beloved grandmother, “Little by little . . . . Like a strip of brown land, receding from the eyes of the travelers on a ship . . . . ” Of the longer stories, “Cordoba” doesn’t do enough with the relationship between an Israeli architect touring Spain and the virginal American girl to whom he’s attracted; but “Uncle Shmuel” offers an appealing portrayal of an ebullient, distractingly ambitious jack-of-all trades. And Shabtai strikes deeper in the compact tale (“The Voyage to Mauritius”) of a socialist atheist whose Job-like travail and arduous passage (during WWII) to the new country of Israel purifies and ennobles him. Shabtai’s versatility is shown by the picaresque tale of a resourceful hustler noted for his ingenious moneymaking schemes (“A Private and Very Awesome Leopard”) and the unusual title story, which details a passionate Communist’s obsession with the unstable woman “revolutionary” who loves, leaves, and unmans him.
Richly varied and moving fiction: the work of a little-known writer who deserves to be remembered.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2004
ISBN: 1-58567-340-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
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
Told through the points of view of the four Garcia sisters- Carla, Sandi, Yolanda and Sofia-this perceptive first novel by poet Alvarez tells of a wealthy family exiled from the Dominican Republic after a failed coup, and how the daughters come of age, weathering the cultural and class transitions from privileged Dominicans to New York Hispanic immigrants. Brought up under strict social mores, the move to the States provides the girls a welcome escape from the pampered, overbearingly protective society in which they were raised, although subjecting them to other types of discrimination. Each rises to the challenge in her own way, as do their parents, Mami (Laura) and Papi (Carlos). The novel unfolds back through time, a complete picture accruing gradually as a series of stories recounts various incidents, beginning with ``Antojos'' (roughly translated ``cravings''), about Yolanda's return to the island after an absence of five years. Against the advice of her relatives, who fear for the safety of a young woman traveling the countryside alone, Yolanda heads out in a borrowed car in pursuit of some guavas and returns with a renewed understanding of stringent class differences. ``The Kiss,'' one of Sofia's stories, tells how she, married against her father's wishes, tries to keep family ties open by visiting yearly on her father's birthday with her young son. And in ``Trespass,'' Carla finds herself the victim of ignorance and prejudice a year after the Garcias have arrived in America, culminating with a pervert trying to lure her into his car. In perhaps one of the most deft and magical stories, ``Still Lives,'' young Sandi has an extraordinary first art lesson and becomes the inspiration for a statue of the Virgin: ``Dona Charito took the lot of us native children in hand Saturday mornings nine to twelve to put Art into us like Jesus into the heathen.'' The tradition and safety of the Old World are just part of the tradeoff that comes with the freedom and choice in the New. Alvarez manages to bring to attention many of the issues-serious and light-that immigrant families face, portraying them with sensitivity and, at times, an enjoyable, mischievous sense.
Pub Date: May 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-945575-57-2
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
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