Charmingly taut fiction that occasionally cries out for broader canvases.
Fifty ultra-brief stories by the Slovenian writer that revel in absurdity and pointed ironies. This is his second collection (Skinswaps, 1998) translated into English.
No piece is longer than four pages, and many are only a paragraph or two. The fiction is driven more by aphorisms, jokes and paradoxes than storytelling—readers of Lydia Davis’ fiction will be familiar with the technique. But Blatnik has a knack for wringing insight and meaning out of such concision, and he occasionally places stories with similar themes next to each other to exploit their resonances. “One,” in which a man imagines an animal sleeping next to him, is followed by “Say That,” about picking up a girl in a bar, which is followed by “Separation,” in which a man wakes up in a strange woman’s bed. In this trio and elsewhere, the theme is isolation; Blatnik is concerned with how our feelings of security are challenged while we’re alone. He writes skillfully in a variety of tones. “Experts” is a slice of political satire in which PR pros discuss promoting a war; “Home From XpanD” compresses into five lines a joke about cultural consumers literally being consumed; and “Cracks” is a mini horror story, evoking the feeling of dread that strikes a man who hits a child with his car in the night. At his most experimental, Blatnik can be downright cubist: “In Passing,” for instance, deploys a series of clipped, staccato sentences to capture a rock flying through the window of a moving train. The stories’ chief flaw is that their brevity usually means that the stakes aren’t very high for his characters—even when the subject matter is serious, Blatnik doesn’t afford himself the space to give them much gravitas. (And the characters are typically nameless, which exacerbates the feeling.) The two pages of “Spinning,” which describe a man who’s panic-struck about his entire future after a botched DJ gig, are nicely turned, but the reader can’t help but wonder what Blatnik might do with the story in five pages, or even ten.
Charmingly taut fiction that occasionally cries out for broader canvases.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-56478-599-2
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2010
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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