A ruminative and wonderfully moving first novel about a sheltered boyhood and adolescence, tracing the confusions and pains visited on its sensitive protagonist by approaching maturity. Aryeh Alexander, a rabbi's son, grows up in the 1960s in Windsor, Ontario. His doting extended family is dominated by his mother's childless best friend Berenice and by Hannalore, the twin sister of his father's Cantor and a survivor whose long-repressed memories of WW II Europe comprise one of several disillusioning lessons Alexander is fated to learn about the complex freedoms and burdens of adulthood. From his scholarly father, Alexander learns that ``it's human nature to seek out patterns wherever they may present themselves''—and the novel proceeds to show his instruction in both the necessity and the limitations of discovering such patterns. The Cantor's patient tending of his potted palm trees cannot prevent the devastation wrought by a tornado. No amount of familial love or protectiveness can prevent the sufferings or deaths of the innocent. And the laborious research undertaken by Alexander's father into the geographical and spiritual origins of mankind in the valley of ``the far Euphrates with its source in Eden'' is destined to yield endless and unanswerable further questions in place of ultimate answers. Stollman expertly dramatizes both Alexander's inevitable fascination with the world outside his somewhat insular family (the mercurial personality of a ``deformed'' girl who simultaneously courts him and pushes him away; his sexual fixation on the briefly glimpsed figure of a handsome older boy); and the intellectual and moral momentum that draws him, despite himself, into the embracing orbit of the world of his fathers. A series of losses, and the acceptance of—and accommodations to—loss elevate the lyrical final pages into both a thoroughly satisfying elegy for all the things that cannot remain and an affirmation of our right and need to believe in the essential permanence of things and of the spirit.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-57322-075-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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