A must-read masterwork by an author whose star should shine brighter in the contemporary firmament.
“A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father….”
The opening line of Quin’s (The Unmapped Country: Stories & Fragments, 2018, etc.) debut novel, originally published in 1964, firmly establishes the British midcentury experimentalist’s intentions for the story to follow. Arriving in an unnamed coastal town resembling Brighton in the offseason, Berg takes a room in a boardinghouse with only a shared particle-board wall separating him from his elderly father—estranged from Berg since childhood—and his father’s much younger mistress, Judith. As he lies in bed listening to the couple's amorous exertions on the other side of the wall, Berg plots his father’s death as a sort of revenge gift to his mother, a fragile and perpetually flustered woman named Edith. The Oedipal strains of the plot continue to thicken as Berg embarks on a faltering seduction of the feral Judith that’s marked by increasingly desperate murder attempts against his feckless, opportunistic father. In the febrile world of postwar England, where the class-driven banalities of poverty meet the geopolitical banalities of a generation for whom heroism is something their parents did, Berg strains against his environment, his desire, his body, and his own psychology in a prose that kinks ever darker and more internal. Quin masterfully blends Berg’s memories, sense impressions, and hallucinations with snippets of preserved text from his mother’s letters so that every scene takes place in prismatic multitude in a style influenced by Virginia Woolf and Marguerite Duras. As the plot becomes more and more ludicrous, Quin’s black humor becomes apparent. Berg is reprehensible but also the sort of sweaty bumbler whose physical comedy as he drags what he believes to be his father’s corpse across town is reminiscent of a classic French farce. Judith, a Freudian grotesque in her own right, is also a deadpan put-down artist with a weakness for impractical shoes. The result is a caustic, destabilizing, and very funny exploration of depravity in a world where nothing seems all that depraved but where the daily exigencies of living overwhelm with their ordinary demands.
A must-read masterwork by an author whose star should shine brighter in the contemporary firmament.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-911508-54-0
Page Count: 168
Publisher: & Other Stories
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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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