A marvelous little collection about compulsion, obsession, and the extraordinary joy that a simple pleasure can bring.
A collection of stories about one writer’s obsession with, of all things, a magazine, attainable but difficult to find in a way he often finds maddening.
Argentinian writer Aira (Birthday, 2019, etc.) has produced more than 100 books, a good number of which have been translated into English. His works tend to be slim and offbeat—a zombie novel here (Dinner, 2015), a kidnapping there (Ema the Captive, 2016)—but they’re always eminently readable. Even this one, which is, yes, pretty much about hunting down a magazine and then, after having taken out a subscription, waiting for it to come in the mail. Is this fiction, as it's labeled, or nonfiction? Aira's work is so personal and frequently peculiar that it doesn't make much of a difference. He's spent a couple of decades thinking about Artforum, judging by the dates at the end of each story—not so much about the magazine’s content as his difficult quest to obtain it. Naturally, he turns each interaction into a beautifully crafted experience, even in the most banal circumstances. Take the opener, “The Sacrifice,” written in 1983, in which an issue of Artforum saves the narrator's other diligently acquired magazines from a particularly vicious rainstorm. Later there are contemplations of the magazine’s price, translated here by Silver as $10, and the personal glory of finally getting a subscription. In 2002, a short-tempered writer goes searching for a trove of Artforums spotted, by happenstance, by a friend. "Conjectures” and “Melancholy" describe the narrator’s state of mind while he waits impatiently for the next issue to arrive in the mail. The writer’s obsession with the magazine is also explained in the context of his life, in which he's always had “the problem of empty time, of ominous afternoons like the open mouth of an abyss.” This book is a slim affair, but for those who want to understand the mindset of an authentic collector, it comes straight from the heart.
A marvelous little collection about compulsion, obsession, and the extraordinary joy that a simple pleasure can bring.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2926-5
Page Count: 80
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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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