Gorgeously written, unsettling, and well worth the read.
An unnerving series of portraits capturing the possible lives of a woman whose remains were discovered near a Montreal hospital in 2001.
When a skeleton was found in the woods surrounding the crumbling, old-fashioned Royal Victoria Hospital, it sparked a national fascination with its identity. Yet despite scientific tests that revealed surprisingly personal characteristics (they describe a middle-aged Caucasian woman with osteoporosis and “high cheekbones, faded features”) and a missing person hotline inundated with leads, “Victoria’s” identity remains unknown. Leroux constructs 12 starkly different possible lives for Victoria, fashioning portraits that are both intimately personal and bound to universal elements of mortality, physicality, and femaleness. In "Victoria Outside," a 16-year-old mother embarks on a haunting journey through Quebec City’s dark alleys and beyond after tragedy strikes. More closely tied to reality yet deeply nuanced, "Victoria Drinks" finds an ambitious woman rising ruthlessly through the ranks of a male-dominated newspaper company, fortified by Scotch, till her aging body rebels—spurring a dizzying meditation on the fragility of human ambition. Other stories evoke more abstract settings. A woman who’s outlasted the decimation of her tribe contemplates the brutal realities of survival in "Victoria Down." A shifting, volatile natural environment—melting ice caps, constantly migrating populations—takes center stage in "Victoria on the Horizon," as a woman struggles to exist in a world that appears to directly attack her body with acute, grotesque physical ailments. Though at first the accounts seem disconnected, the book picks up steam and builds to a complex and thought-provoking conclusion. Expansive and cleareyed, Leroux’s (The Party Wall, 2016) novel expertly probes fallible, achingly human characters to form a portrait of a lost woman and examine the fragile forces that underlie a life.
Gorgeously written, unsettling, and well worth the read.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-77196-207-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
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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