The humor is dark. So is the general outlook. Still, Döblin’s stories are uplifting in their elegance and beauty.
Essential anthology of short works by the master of German literary expressionism.
Berlin Alexanderplatz, the sprawling saga for which Döblin is best known, is long in the telling but without much narrative trickery. The stories gathered here, including the whole of his 1912 debut book, The Murder of a Buttercup, are another matter; many seemingly seek to defy all expectation. The opening story begins with realistic resolution: a Brazilian man finds his way to a Belgian beach and there takes an interest in a woman with rust-colored hair. A gloominess has settled over the story from the outset, with the suggestion that Döblin is working toward a rejoinder to Death in Venice, but if he is, in the end it is by way of Ovid as man and woman sink beneath the waves of the North Sea: “And as they touched the wet waves together, his face turned young; her face turned young and youthful.” Wet waves? Young and youthful? Never mind, for Döblin is off to another fantastic vignette reminiscent not, in the end, of Thomas Mann but instead of Jorge Luis Borges or perhaps Stanislaw Lem. Some of the metamorphoses are literal, some figurative, but which is which is not always clear: does Mary really turn “into a ripe blossom” (and are blossoms ripe, strictly speaking?) when, sitting alongside Joseph, she says to her blessed son, “I love you, I love you, you pledge from God”? That story, “The Immaculate Conception,” exemplifies Döblin’s quiet interest in religious experience, though it is more cheerful, all in all, than most of the stories, which, if quirky and sometimes oddly funny (cow’s cheese, anyone?), end up with the demise of someone or another: “Even in death, the ballerina still had a cold contemptuous look around her mouth.” “Then Death stood up and pulled the canoness by her cold little hands behind him, out through the window.”
The humor is dark. So is the general outlook. Still, Döblin’s stories are uplifting in their elegance and beauty.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59017-973-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
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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