Riveting drama and sensuous prose make for an unforgettable love story.
A stripper unwittingly becomes a sexual surrogate for a wealthy Russian immigrant and his paralyzed wife in Pelzman’s beautifully rendered debut.
Perla is looking for a way out of her dead-end job at a Ft. Lauderdale strip club when she leads Julian Pravdin to the Champagne Room for a private dance. Narrating in the present tense, the pretty Cuban-American is so street-smart that we believe her when she says it’s safe to follow the stranger to the parking lot and, eventually, his hotel. Julian has a soft spot for strippers. Forced into a Siberian orphanage after his father’s death sent his mother on a downward spiral of drug abuse and prostitution, he escaped by drawing on the fighting instincts he inherited from his father, a hunter. Here and elsewhere, Julian’s brutality comes into play, but he never loses the reader's sympathy. He grows up to be a respectable businessman in New York, where he lives with his wife, and though a third-person narrator tells Julian's back story, guarding his thoughts, it’s clear that neither entitlement nor boredom are behind his affair with Perla. His wife, Sophie, is adjusting to a new reality after being paralyzed from the waist down. The initially jarring introduction of this second heroine brings the simmering plot to a boil, revealing it to be a character study in the aftermath of tragedy. Pelzman has a well of sympathy for his characters—the sponge baths Sophie gets from her nurse are every bit as intimate and sensual as the clandestine meetings between Julian and Perla. When the stripper threatens the delicate balance of her marriage, Sophie uses the only weapons she has—her helplessness and ability to elicit pity—to hold on to what’s left of her life. The word troika describes a group of three or a Russian carriage pulled by three horses. With unflinching honesty, the author goes to the source of Julian’s violence, Perla’s emotional detachment and Sophie’s manipulation to show how a third horse could work in a two-horse marriage.
Riveting drama and sensuous prose make for an unforgettable love story.Pub Date: May 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-399-16748-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Amy Einhorn/Putnam
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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
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