Like a lot of similar fiction, this well-crafted novel finds its protagonist suspended between two cultures, a part of each...
A boy searches for answers, home, his identity, and his destiny after mysterious family circumstances transplant him from his native Zanzibar to London.
A veteran novelist who was born in Zanzibar and has long been a professor of literature in England, Gurnah (The Last Gift, 2014, etc.) offers a first-person narrative involving rites of passage for a character whose circumstances are similar to his own. At a pivotal point the narrator says, “I felt like a character at the end of a novel on his way to adventure and fulfilment.” Not so fast, for the protagonist has barely made his way through a third of this tale, and fulfillment might not be a realistic expectation. What little he's learned about the world has come from reading novels, a passion he inherited from his father, who has abandoned the household in something resembling disgrace, with the son sent to England to study business under the patronage of his more worldly, glamorous uncle. “Something broke in my father’s life a long time ago and I was the debris of [my parents'] disordered lives,” says Salim, as he has belatedly introduced himself. The source of this disorder remains a mystery to Salim even after the birth of a sister whose father could not possibly be his. He angers his uncle by rejecting business for the study of literature and finds a measure of independence as he experiences a sexual awakening. Yet his mother’s death brings him back to a very different Zanzibar, post-revolutionary and now teeming with tourists. His father, who had been all but silent throughout his son’s narration, now feels himself compelled to illuminate the dark secrets that have split his family, and he does so through a series of chapters that function almost like soliloquies, letting Salim know what his mother did and why.
Like a lot of similar fiction, this well-crafted novel finds its protagonist suspended between two cultures, a part of each yet apart from both.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63286-813-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
PROFILES
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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