The Caprices

Rating:
Summary: Incredible
Review: I wouldn't necessarily say this is a bad book. But I certainly wouldn't say it's a good book either. The most remarkable thing about it is just how forgettable it is. For such a short collection of stories, you wouldn't expect to have completely forgotten the first two or three by the time you reach the end. And you certainly wouldn't expect it from a book that won the Pen/Faulkner Award.

Suffice to say that I was disappointed by The Caprices. The stories were sometimes bland, sometimes disjointed, rarely fully developed and never all that entertaining. The characters are too often one-dimensional, a common pitfall in short stories but one that is avoided easily enough by better writers. Murray has found a distinct literary voice, but not a particularly engaging one. There's nothing in the prose that would keep me awake at night if the plot failed to do so, which it did more than once.

To put Sabina Murray in the same category as Stephen Crane, as one critic has done, is completely unjustified. Perhaps the high praise is simply because the subject matter - wartime experiences in the Philippines and elsewhere in the Pacific - is relatively fresh and untouched. For that I suppose she deserves some credit, but it's not enough to carry an otherwise mediocre work.

Rating:
Summary: This won the Pen/Faulkner?
Review: I wouldn't necessarily say this is a bad book. But I certainly wouldn't say it's a good book either. The most remarkable thing about it is just how forgettable it is. For such a short collection of stories, you wouldn't expect to have completely forgotten the first two or three by the time you reach the end. And you certainly wouldn't expect it from a book that won the Pen/Faulkner Award.

Suffice to say that I was disappointed by The Caprices. The stories were sometimes bland, sometimes disjointed, rarely fully developed and never all that entertaining. The characters are too often one-dimensional, a common pitfall in short stories but one that is avoided easily enough by better writers. Murray has found a distinct literary voice, but not a particularly engaging one. There's nothing in the prose that would keep me awake at night if the plot failed to do so, which it did more than once.

To put Sabina Murray in the same category as Stephen Crane, as one critic has done, is completely unjustified. Perhaps the high praise is simply because the subject matter - wartime experiences in the Philippines and elsewhere in the Pacific - is relatively fresh and untouched. For that I suppose she deserves some credit, but it's not enough to carry an otherwise mediocre work.

Rating:
Summary: Incredible
Review: The best book of fiction written by anyone in her generation. (Unless A CARNIVORE'S INQUIRY is even better.)

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful
Review: The nine short stories here are all linked to the Pacific Campaign of WWII (Malaysia, the Philippines, New Guinea), encompassing the native civilians and combatants as well as the Japanese, American, and Australian soldiers who traveled far to fight each other there. More than anything, the stories are about the suffering-both physical and psychological-of both those who fought and those who were bystanders. Occasionally these drift into a surreal realm (not magical realist) inhabited by the dead and the walking spiritually dead.

"Order of Precedence" is a deceptively simple tale of Harry Gillen, an Anglo-Indian officer interred in the Changi POW camp (made famous by real life POW James Clavell's novel King Rat). When his former commander in India appears as a POW, Gillen's story flashes back to his days in India, where he is an officer, but never accepted as a full gentleman. "Guinea" follows two American soldiers, Francino and Burns, lost in the jungle of New Guinea, they bicker and take a Japanese prisoner. "Walkabout" is about an Australian veteran who survives life as a POW building the railroad to Burma (as seen in Pierre Boulle's book and the subsequent film, The Bridge on the River Kwai). After the war, as a rancher, he is haunted by those who never came home from the jungle. "Folly" tells of a Dutch plantation manger, the Indonesian guerilla leader who tries to buy guns from him, and how the war changed their lives. "Colossus" is similar to "Walkabout " in that it's main character is a former POW (this one American) who will never escape the horrors of being a POW. in old age, he is able to repay the Filipino who rescued him from the Bataan Death March (which is well-described in the history Ghost Soldiers).

"Intramuros" is a series of brief vignettes about a Manilla family, and how the war affected it. It's the most seemingly autobiographical story in the collection, but also the least strictly constructed. "The Caprices" is also about a Filipino family, and the terror of the Japanese occupation brings to them. Set in the early '70s, "Yashamita's Gold" is a mini-thriller about missing treasure from the war. Japanese Gen. Yashamita purportedly had a massive hoard of gold and jewels looted from occupied territories that vanished during the tail end of the war. The story tells of the possible surfacing of that treasure and how it affects two Japanese in hiding in Manila many years later. Finally, the most fanciful story of the collection is "Position," which posits a tired Amelia Earhart scouting Saipan in 1937 and being captured by the Japanese.

These stories are an invaluable addition to WWII literature, all the more remarkable for being written by a woman several generations removed from the war. They provide a rare glimpse into the impact of the Pacific Campaign on the Filipino people, and a haunting reminder of how long war's wounds can linger.