A raw, gritty, shiver-inducing—but very readable—account of a young man in a spiral of grief and self-destruction.
The debut from Canadian writer Khan offers a sharp, often disturbing primer on toxic masculinity.
Omar Ali is a 27-year-old line cook in Toronto. He gets a call from the father of his on-again, off-again girlfriend, Anna, from whom he's been estranged. Anna has killed herself...and has, her father insists, left no note for Omar. The rest of the book depicts in often agonizing, sometimes darkly humorous detail the emotional disfigurements Omar suffers—or inflicts on himself—in the aftermath of her death. Omar's grief gets sublimated into violence (he's fired for brutally slapping a co-worker), sex (we get a blow-by-blow of his affair with Kali, a young woman who comes from a Hare Krishna family); crime (mainly petty theft); and rage-posting on the internet (he blows off steam by threatening terrorist violence on Reddit). Omar also reconnects with Hussain, an old neighborhood pal who's farther along the path to self-immolation—a little crueler, more unhinged, more alienated, and more reckless. After they break into a house, two members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police call on Omar. He's been under surveillance, so they have him over a barrel, but if he'll go visit local mosques and provide information, or if he'll help entrap his friend Hussain, they can keep him out of jail and provide cash. The portrait of Omar that emerges is hard to look at, and that's to Khan's credit; the inner lives of snarling, stunted, solipsistic man-boys aren't pleasant to see. Most fascinating are the ways Omar's status as a Canadian Muslim figure in. As he's well aware, for him there can be no such thing as a personal crisis, because the personal is always also political; there can be no alienation that doesn't also exacerbate his status as an alien in his own country and city, even his own skin.
A raw, gritty, shiver-inducing—but very readable—account of a young man in a spiral of grief and self-destruction.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-55152-785-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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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