The first of Piersanti’s several novels to reach English translation. May his others follow soon.
The progress of an emotional and physical “crack-up” is traced in meticulous and spine-tingling detail in this accomplished 1997 Italian novel.
It sticks closely to the daily routines, thoughts, and increasing fears of Luisa, a 60-year-old unmarried accountant who works for a toy-making firm. The story begins with a “vertiginous” waking dream of being trapped in a building without walls or floors, and then quickly segues into a series of unspecified disturbances: a sudden panic attack while lunching in a comfortable restaurant; repeated “nuisance” phone calls in which no voices are heard; the sight of a beautiful black cat struck by a car, its spine broken, slowly dying; a doll that seems to adopt differing, menacing facial expressions and postures. Piersanti varies the novel’s claustrophobic intensity with Luisa’s fragmented memories of her ebullient, loving father and especially her former lover Bruno, out of her life for the past ten years. When Bruno unexpectedly visits, to reclaim an old photograph, they’re cordial, but Luisa cannot bring herself to what seem to be his advances. Thereafter, her vague apprehensions of something threatening her multiply alarmingly. “Perhaps in her body, without her being aware of it, a terrible battle was taking place against disease and the brain had other things to do than follow its ordinary controls.” Or perhaps she’s the quarry of an entity described by the woman co-worker who has seen it in a current film: “The Nothing that Advances.” A tendency toward repetitiveness in the final fifty or so pages has the unfortunate effect of relaxing the tension just when we feel it should be ratcheting up unbearably. Still, Piersanti’s firm concentration on Luisa’s vulnerability and her surrender to hallucinatory fantasies keeps the reader’s attention riveted.
The first of Piersanti’s several novels to reach English translation. May his others follow soon.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8101-6088-9
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Northwestern Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 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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