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The Caprices

PEN/Faulkner Award winning collection of short stories that draws inspiration from the Pacific Campaign of WWII

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The Caprices

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Winner of the PEN/Faulkner award for fiction in 2003, The Caprices is an artful history told across the theater of the Pacific Campaign of World War II. An Anglo-Indian cavalryman, his homeland on the brink of revolution, finds himself in Malaysia fighting to protect British interests. Two soldiers lost in the jungle with a Japanese prisoner confront their prejudices toward each other, and the nature of being American. An island witnesses the passing of history from Magellan to Amelia Earhart to the dropping of the atomic bomb. With exquisite lyricism tempered by a journalist’s eye for detail, Murray shines light on the tangle of battles created by the conflict, the violent reach across generations, and the shattering reverberations in memory. With this collection, Sabina Murray established herself as a passionate and wise voice of literary fiction.

"Murray writes stories of fierce intensity, stories that are evocative, distinct, and haunting."—Claire Messud, New York Review of Books

"Murray reveals war in a way that few writers do, and with such force and beauty and authenticity that I was astonished by this collection...THE CAPRICES equals the achievement of Stephen Crane."—Los Angeles Times

"Stunning...The two notions of war as another planet and of cognitive displacement are rendered with chance timing and shocking force."—The New York Times

"Murray has marshaled searing prose to construct tales of faith, courage, and savagery."—The Seattle Times

"Nine glittering stories...The author renders [WWII's] aftermath in prose both unflinching and majestic."—The Washington Post

From the story "Guinea"

Midway through his time as a soldier, Francino found himself lost in the heart of the jungle. His companion was an Irishman from Boston named Burns and in their protection was a Japanese prisoner, starved beyond hope, who would not survive the next two days. They wandered without the warmth of natural sun. Rather, the large leaves and woven canopy filtered the light into a thousand gradations of shade. In this strange place, nothing was inanimate. Even the trees and rocks appeared to breathe. The prisoner stumbled onward scared and without will. Francino had not made the decision to let him live, which Burns was responsible for. Francino did not like deciding the fate of other men anymore than he liked contending with his own survival day after day; his concerns were with the after life and how he was going to reconcile his current rifle-wielding, Jap-killing life with God.
Maybe he had not suffered long enough, not like Burns who had been battling it out for eighteen months. The Japanese soldier— his clothes rotted, a white loin cloth visible through the seat of his shorts—this was the first Jap that Francino had seen close up.
“If you’d seen more, you’d be dead by now,” Burns told him. “In Guinea, a Jap close up is the last thing a man sees.” Which made Burns sound wise, when he wasn’t. Burns talked like the majority of the people Francino knew. Burns had a loud voice and an admirable sense of purpose, which was one of the perks war had for the unsophisticated. Francino listened for the thrum of engines in the sky, the powerful cough of machinery to cut through the billion singing insects. But there was no sound not intended by nature. Here, it was the Garden of Eden, primordial, pristine, unforgiving. Here there was nothing to eat and Francino amused himself with the thought that if anyone offered food, even a snake holding an apple, he would take it and eat it—no questions asked.