A tough-and-tender study of street life.
A clutch of stories exploring the perilous and complex inner lives of residents of Rio’s favelas.
This taut debut collection is mostly populated by young men who’ve been quickly hardened by the druggy, violent milieu of Brazil’s slums, where “sorry’s a feeling you get and lose quick,” as one narrator puts it. But most tend to be spectators, not participants, and none are so hardened that their characters lapse into gangland clichés. The drug-dealer-adjacent narrator of “Lil Spin” just wants to avoid being hassled by a cop for smoking a blunt on the beach; in “The Tag,” a veteran graffiti artist is trying to keep painting despite having a son at home and violence in the air; a recovering crack addict in “Padre Miguel Station” laments the drug’s impact on his old neighborhood, down to the pregnant junkie he spots on one grim visit; and the hero of “The Crossing” is a low-level thug ferrying a corpse to a landfill, though Martins wryly allows a sliver of guilt to slip inside him. (“He was so sure he was done for, he even started thinking about God.”) Martins’ prose (via Sanches’ translation) is fast-paced and slangy (“riding dirty’s a cinch, the parley’s slick”) while preserving the flavor of its Portuguese source; the word “perrengue,” slang for “problem,” stands untranslated for a kind of struggle remembered with a certain fondness (“We’ve been through plenty of perrengues together”; “one person’s perrengue can be another’s joy”). That word crystallizes the retrospective mood of these 13 stories, which are more sketches of remembered moments than full-bodied tales. At their best, though, Martins' sketches are remarkably powerful, as in “The Case of the Butterfly,” in which a boy watches a butterfly sink in a pan of frying oil and recognizes a symbol of his impending fate.
A tough-and-tender study of street life.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-22377-9
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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