Customer Reviews

The Caprices

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The Caprices is the best book of stories published in the US in the last twenty years, and Grove Press should be congratulated for the wise reprint. In addition to being a great read from cover-to-cover, the book functions as a how-to manual for anyone interested in the short story. The title story is unlike anything else--a war story that draws on the Gothic, while "Guinea" is comic, tragic, and one of the best stories about baseball ever written, bringing together an Italian-American GI, an Irish-American GI, and a very surprising Japanese POW. "Order of Precedence," one of the great works of post-colonial literature, tells the story of a gifted soldier and polo player, a man of Indian and Scottish descent, whose fate is determined by a jealous Englishman. "Walkaabout" documents the experiences of Australian soldiers on the infamous Burma-Siam Railroad, while "Intramuros" links together a string of stories from the author's family in Manila during the Japanes occupation--a comic treatment of some very harrowing subject matter. The last story, "Position," is a post-modern romp through the history of a Pacific island, and it has already been included in the newest Norton Anthology. This is a must-read for anyone interested in the short story, world history, the effects of colonialism, or simply a great read

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.

Murray's descriptive novel of war-torn SEAsia is full of life's ironies. Though the number of stories is meager, but the richness the tales evoke is heady and captures the horrors and human frailty during those trying times.

She is one of the best Filipino-American authors in English so far.

The stories in this collection - told variously by characters such as POWs (Indian and American), Filipino civilians caught in the conflagration, Amelia Earhart and numerous displaced persons of that time, animate and brought to life the humanly shared experiences of war albeit from different perspectives. The tales also spoke of the capriciousness of life and the fate of those caught in the midst of war against the larger narratives (myths?) of history where portents and posterity tend to dominate official narratives. Reading them as s series brought on a strange sense of poignancy and even nostalgia for a place and time I never knew, where dying seemed so much alive and vivid than the placid normalcy of peacetime living. Murray's unaffected and descriptive prose brought to life images and places that are stark yet real in their complexity, creating a sense of presently felt immediacy to what war felt like.

At some level, I felt such stories to be necessary reading even if only to counteract the degree to which we have become inured to the images and reports of war in faraway places like Iraq and Afghanistan; we can hardly connect at a human level with what living IN war feels like. This volume also brought to mind Peter Englund's The Beauty and the Sorrow, a collection of biographical accounts of disparate civilians living through the First World War. There is something tenuous yet significant in reading such accounts (even if they may be fictionalized imaginations or composite accounts) that draw on the real. It is as if through such literary encounters we memorialize and pay our respects to those much like ourselves who happened to have lived in those fraught times, whom in all other respects could well have been us, and thus in a strange way we assert the value of ordinary lives having been in the world.

This collection is one the best works by Fil-Ams in the English language. Her works rocks!!! My teach assigned this book to us and because of her choice, I learned to appreciate the country of my roots. You rock, girl!!

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.

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