A gorgeously written, profoundly upsetting fairy tale of race, class, power, and desire.
In her latest work to be published in the United States, Devi (Eve Out of Her Ruins, 2016, etc.), a celebrated Mauritian author, uses modern London as a place to explore the legacy of colonialism and the limitations of global culture.
Mary Grimes, an old white woman, is sitting in her rotting home in Portobello Road, reminiscing as she waits to die. Her thoughts drift back to her youth during World War II. With death looming, young people are given license to live, and even timid Mary Rose manages to have a sexual adventure. She escapes her family and the countryside for London when her grandfather leaves her his terraced house, and, there, she works as a sculptor until arthritis makes that impossible. She is now purposeless, poor, and alone—until she meets Cub. The son of a single mother of Jamaican descent, Cub is 13 when he begins doing odd jobs for Mary, 13 when he moves into her house, and 13 when he starts sleeping in her bed. Devi’s language is luscious (translator Zuckerman deserves notice for turning the author’s French into fluid, exquisitely precise English), and her depiction of Mary so gentle, that the reader might be lulled into hoping that this relationship is somehow not as grotesque as it seems. Like the best narratives that use fantastic tropes, this one defies being reduced to one simple set of meanings, but it’s fair to say that the novel uses the lens of post-colonialism to test the promises of cosmopolitanism and liberalism. Devi is a native of Mauritius, an island in the Indian Ocean ruled by the Netherlands, France, and Great Britain before its independence in 1968. It’s not difficult to see Mary, in her frailty, as a ghost of the British Empire, drawing fresh vitality from young black newcomers to the kingdom while relegating them to the status of subhuman chattel. The genius of this story is that Devi goes beyond revealing this dynamic to explore its insidious, often invisible reach.
A gorgeously written, profoundly upsetting fairy tale of race, class, power, and desire.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-936932-70-2
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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