Kirshenbaum offers many finely nuanced moments and raises unexpected moral issues—about Germany and the Jews, about the...
The story of two lovers whose lives are profoundly shaken by echoes of the Holocaust: a German medievalist and the woman who, while writing his biography, falls in love with him.
Born and raised in New York City, Hester Rosenfeld quickly discarded the embarrassing ways of her Jewish immigrant parents, with their longing to become, in her eyes sentimentally, “American.” Since leaving them behind, she has risen through the academy and even achieved modest commercial success with her “kitchen table histories”—featuring the everyday lives of unremarkable people. Though her specialty has been Colonial America, she meets Heinrich Falk (b. 1943)—referred to throughout as HF—and is mesmerized by his steely German good looks. The sex, as in most Kirshenbaum fictions (Pure Poetry, 2000, etc.), is earth-moving, and Hester happily adopts the role of official mistress to the married Falk, even as she researches the history of his numerous past infidelities, quartet of marriages, and irrepressible womanizing. As it happens, Falk has no official, verifiable Nazi darkness in his past—a brother in the Hitler Youth who possibly engaged in terrorism, an aunt who joined the Nazi party early—yet when Falk, overtired and frustrated, cautions Hester against seeming to be “a greedy Jew,” she realizes she cannot abide him any longer. During her research, she comes to terms with aspects of her own ambivalence toward her parents (she learns they were forced to flee Falk’s hometown of Munich) but resists Falk’s attempts to get her to look closely at her own past. Hester and Falk angrily part ways, having realized that they—and their histories—are forever irreconcilable.
Kirshenbaum offers many finely nuanced moments and raises unexpected moral issues—about Germany and the Jews, about the nature of history and biography—but this is not a novel of strenuous moral purpose. It'll be most enjoyed for its agile style and Hester’s distinctively intelligent voice.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-393-04152-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
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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