A canny exploration of how much we reveal about ourselves when we talk about others.
The second installment in Tiller’s penetrating three-part novel about the varied perceptions others have of us, emphasizing the gaps in Norway’s class ladder.
This volume of Tiller’s trilogy (Encircling, 2017) follows the format of the first: three people respond to a letter that a man named David has placed in the paper asking for details about his life—he's had an accident-induced bout of amnesia—while relating details of their own lives. We hear from Ole, a childhood friend who is flailing at his efforts to manage his drug-dealing teenage stepson; Tom Roger, a friend from David's teen years with a history of criminality and domestic abuse; and Paula, a friend of David’s mother who has a few clues about the novel’s central question of the identity of David’s father. Of the three narrators, Tom Roger is at once the most gripping and troubling: his section is thick with scenes of him battering his current girlfriend and ex-wife as well as memories of David’s own dark history. (He poisoned a dog as an act of revenge, for instance, and his grandfather was an infamous bootlegger.) It’s also the most revealing about the distinctions between Tom Roger’s lower-class station (“a family of drunks, benefit scroungers and petty criminals”) and the higher rungs; he’s tense about the “ice-smile” judgment of his girlfriend’s well-off mother and rants to David about how the airbrushed MTV version of the 1980s hardly resembled the hardscrabble one he lived through. There are difficult scenes throughout (a raped and murdered child, sexual molestation, and allegations of incest), though the narrators in this volume tend to be more long-winded, which blunts the impact of their revelations. Still, this volume stands alone well and has a twist climax that sets up more questions about David for the third book while also making this one satisfying in itself.
A canny exploration of how much we reveal about ourselves when we talk about others.Pub Date: March 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-55597-801-3
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
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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