A splendidly lightweight collection whose satiric touch is so deft that it seems to be sending up a genre yet unborn.
Forty-two stories, many new to English-language readers, that reveal not only the range of the Russian master (1860–1904) but what crime stories were like before they became their own genre.
As the brilliant sketch “What You Usually Find in Novels” points out, the 19th-century novel was encrusted with clichés. Not so the crime story, whose rules had yet to be set in stone. So Chekhov is free to explore the frontiers among persons, events and tones not yet established as generic types. The comically, often disastrously unprepossessing heroes of these tales can awaken from a night at the cemetery or a night of horror to realize how vacuous were the bogeymen that frightened them; virtuous souls can take unspeakable actions without quite noticing what they’re up to, and end up dragging even more innocent passersby to their doom; compulsive confessors can bare their darkest secrets without realizing how anticlimactic they are; and the author can repeatedly lay the groundwork for dramatic courtroom scenes and then cut away from them, thumbing his nose at any assumptions about suspense. Chekhov’s lifelong habit of throwing away scenes he’s portentously built up to is nowhere more obvious than in the three longest stories here. “The Swedish Match” and “The Drama at the Hunt,” for example, begin like well-behaved whodunits before tailing off mischievously into regions the writers’ manuals warn you away from. And in the third, “Thieves,” an ordinary man who falls among seducers and robbers shows in the end that he’s even more ordinary than he knows. The translation, by turns stately (the patronymics remain intact) and colloquial, takes some getting used to, but it certainly frees the author from any Victorian overlay.
A splendidly lightweight collection whose satiric touch is so deft that it seems to be sending up a genre yet unborn.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-933648-86-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2008
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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