It is not so much a story as a reflection on the roads taken in life, and the roads not taken. Above all, it is noteworthy that the story takes the form of a dialogue with the past, in this case the ghosts of idealistic young people. The old man who tells the story might be resident in Louisiana, but he is living in Paris, at a time when he shared a chapter of his youth with someone who would change the course of his country's history. Not all the stories are retrospective and haunted. Many of them, such as Snow and Love, look forward to the future.
Snow is a wonderfully controlled, poignant tale of lonely people who find each other.
Love is not only poignant, but contains superbly ironic writing that is right out of Nabokov - especially the narrator's quest for the all important voodoo ingredient of male goat manure. There is also a strong sense of play in many of the monologues. Even though Fairy Tale is a sad story about a former Saigon bar girl working in Bourbon Street after her relationship with an American has ended, it is also playful. She is at first confused but, in the end, is pleased with the notion of somebody being able to climb up on the back of time and ride like a bull. It is one of those cases in which the culturally familiar is de-familiarised by someone coming to it from the outside.