Vivid in its details, but the self-consciously intellectual narrative fails to engage.
Dreamlike fragmentary chapters evoke a bleak post-apocalypse world, one where capitalism is the enemy and the collective the ideal.
Noted French author Volodine (Naming the Jungle, 1996, etc.) is better at describing the desolate world he evokes than at making the plight of his characters credible—or the ideas that ostensibly shape his ambitious tale. Each of the 49 short chapters, called “narracts—novelistic snapshot(s),” has to do with a brief incident involving one of 49 different characters, whose lives occasionally intersect. These people inhabit a world devastated by a disaster that’s never precisely defined, though the implications are that it had to do with nuclear fission. The disaster, in any case, has left the world with a minuscule population, a Mars-like landscape, and a food shortage. Survivors rear chickens in abandoned apartments, head out to cities where explorers retreat to their winter camp at “number 12 on the Rue du Cormatin,” or follow abandoned rail tracks that hug the shoreline. The third “narract” introduces Laetitia Scheidmann, who, along with the other immortal crones, has been sequestered by veterinarians at the Spotted Wheat Nursing Home. There, though it’s forbidden, she decides to fashion a grandson. She collects scraps of cloth and lint, presses them into an embryonic ball, then fertilizes and gestates it with the help of her fellow crones. They hope that Will, the grandson, will revive radicalism and revolutionary action, but, decades later, Will, instead, has restored capitalism, a crime for which they sentence him to death and order a firing squad to execute him. But before that happens, they are overcome by memories mixed with hallucinations from the pipes they smoke. Will, who develops a hideous skin disease, is the narrator of these stories, told to his grandmothers as the population drastically declines, gas-emitting meteorites become more frequent, and all forms of life begin to die.
Vivid in its details, but the self-consciously intellectual narrative fails to engage.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2004
ISBN: 0-8032-4672-2
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
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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