This vast, inordinately ambitious follow-up to Solzhenitsyn's long-aborning magnum opus The Red Wheel (whose first volume August 1914 appeared in English translation in 1972!), published in Russia in 1993, will alternately frustrate, exhaust, and generously reward readers willing to grapple with it. In a polyphonic narrative that sweeps from remote eastern villages to the Western Front of WWI, where grenadiers nervously await the resumption of stalled hostilities, Solzhenitsyn scrupulously juxtaposes the impersonal march of historical events against intimate views of representative individual lives caught up in their momentum. As the European war grinds on, depleting resources and alienating ordinary citizens from Russia's indifferent royal family (Tsar Nikolai II and his "Empress" Aleksandra) and the ineffectual royalist parliament ("Duma"), both the militant Constitutional Democratic Party ("Kadets") and the more narrowly nationalist Bolsheviks plot the destruction of the monarchy. Regimental commander Giorgi Vorotyntsev (a pivotal character in August 1914) sinks into increasing despair over his country's disastrous involvement in an unwinnable war (" . . . people must be made to realize that all things, even Russia, have limits"), as his "betrayal" of his trusting wife foreshadows the overthrow of the Tsar. Other varying attitudes toward military intervention, domestic economic policy, the treatment of Russia's Jews, and several more equally "knotty" topics are embodied in such vividly drawn characters as "liberal"-thinking artillery officer "Sanya" Lazhenitsyn; soldier Blagodarev (whose return home occasions an impassioned depiction of his impoverished village); Cossack-born firebrand journalist Fyodor Kovynev (a caricature of Soviet-approved novelist Mikhail Sholokhov), and the wily Swiss "millionaire revolutionary" Parvus—who conspires with "Lenin in Zurich" (the title under which this long section was published separately in 1976). Inevitably, all this is impressive—even despite the interminable conversations that these and other passionately engaged characters frequently indulge in. If Nobel laureate Solzhenitsyn is a great writer, it's in the same way that Dreiser and Zola are great writers. The Red Wheel sequence is unlike anything else in contemporary fiction (or, indeed, since its obvious inspiration: Tolstoy's War and Peace). Therefore, be warned. But do attempt it.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-374-22314-9
Page Count: 1040
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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