Crisp prose, vivid detail and imagery and a rich awareness of the unity of human generations, people and animals, and Nell’s...
The stages of a woman’s life and loves are presented in 11 elegantly linked episodes, in the Booker-winning Canadian author’s latest collection.
Atwood (The Tent, Jan. 2006, etc.) mingles omniscient with first-person narrative, moving backward and forward in time through nearly seven decades, to portray her (initially unnamed) sentient protagonist, a freelance journalist and sometime teacher whose eventual commitment to writing seems born of the secrets and evasions into which a lifetime of relationships and responsibilities propels her. We first meet her (in “The Bad News”) as an elderly woman who lives with her longtime companion, Gilbert (nicknamed “Tig”), in a menacing imagined future shaped by environmental and political catastrophes and further imperiled by approaching “barbarians.” Next, scenes from her childhood disclose complex feelings toward her somewhat distant mother and the younger sister (Lizzie) she’s obliged to help raise, and—while garbed for Halloween as “The Headless Horseman”—resentment of Lizzie’s increasingly irrational fears and mood swings. The agonies of being a sensitive teen and a socially challenged “brain” are beautifully captured in “My Last Duchess.” Then, Nell (finally named, when Atwood shifts into omniscient narration) finds something less than happiness when the aforementioned Tig leaves his flamboyant, demanding wife Oona for her, and Nell’s energies are subsumed for years in caring for him, his two sons, the infuriating Oona and, once again, her unstable, possibly schizophrenic sibling. The final stories are concerned with her aging parents’ last days and the legacy of photographs, stories and memories that comprise her family’s inchoate history and point the way toward a fulfillment perhaps implicit in the jumble of false starts and unresolved commitments that her life has hitherto been.
Crisp prose, vivid detail and imagery and a rich awareness of the unity of human generations, people and animals, and Nell’s own exterior and inmost selves, make this one of Atwood’s most accessible and engaging works yet.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2006
ISBN: 0-385-50384-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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
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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