Even with the slightest of flourishes, Neuman demonstrates a marvelous gift for the medium of short stories, infusing each...
Thirty-four short fictions from a splendid practitioner of the craft.
Neuman (Traveller of the Century, 2009, etc.), who was born in Buenos Aires and lives in Spain, is one of the rising stars of Spanish literature, and his reputation should only grow with these new English translations of his short fiction by Caistor and Garcia. These stories of varying length are divided into five discrete groups, plus a delightful addendum of writing maxims at the end. The collection touches a vast diversity of human experience, with meditations on mortality, identity, and forgiveness starched with a liberal amount of bone-dry humor. In the opener, "Happiness," a man named Marcos confesses that he has always wanted to be his friend Cristóbal despite the fact that his friend is sleeping with his wife. In “A Line in the Sand,” a couple finds a dangerous tension in which neither party is sure how far to go. Other stories are wildly inventive. In “Juan, José,” we meet a troubled man and his psychiatrist, both locked in a cycle of denial that is so dynamic that it’s eventually impossible to separate the physician from his patient. Neuman needs only the slightest of strokes to make his point, too. In “The Laughing Suicide,” we hear the confession of a man on the edge of self-harm. “I am ashamed of the ridiculous euphoria that ripples through my stomach as the weapon falls to the floor,” he writes. “Each time this mishap occurs, and although I’ve always been a man of my word, I offer myself a brief postponement. A week. Two. A month, at most. And in the meantime, of course, I try to have fun.” Whether it’s a portrait of a man preparing a deadly fish in “Poison” or the widower who has chosen to forgive his enemies in “After Elena,” Neuman’s stories carry a precision and grace that demonstrate a playful, witty, and piercing intelligence at work.
Even with the slightest of flourishes, Neuman demonstrates a marvelous gift for the medium of short stories, infusing each with equal parts compassion and conflict.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-940953-18-2
Page Count: 190
Publisher: Open Letter
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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