Likely to rank with the best story collections of the year.
The Irish-born, award-winning novelist reconfirms his mastery of the short story.
Tóibín broadened his readership and raised his profile with the exquisitely bittersweet Brooklyn (2009), and this collection is every bit as rich. Befitting an author who straddles cultures (he teaches at Princeton while retaining a home in Dublin), he peoples his stories with characters trying to navigate between different countries, often involving some reconciliation of a past and present. Many of the stories involve homosexual protagonists (engaged in sexual relations more explicit than anything in Brooklyn), with sexual identity practically another country, a boundary to straddle or cross. “The future is a foreign country; they do things differently there,” he writes of the reunion in “The Pearl Fishers” of two men and a woman, friends from school, where the woman didn’t know that the men had a physical relationship before she fell in love with one of them and married him. The story builds to the revelations that have brought them together again with the things that must remain unsaid. Though most of the stories involve family dynamics (as did his Mothers and Sons: Stories, 2007), the narratives underscore “how apart people were…how deeply and singly themselves.” A strong sense of mortality also permeates the stories, as the first-person narrator of the title story meditates on how “I, like anyone else who was born, will be condemned eventually to lie in darkness as long as time lasts.” The last story is the longest and one of the strongest, as the 68 pages of “The Street” find a Pakistani immigrant to Barcelona, brought there in a contemporary form of indentured servitude, learning so much about power, others and himself. It’s a novel’s worth of material compressed into a long story.
Likely to rank with the best story collections of the year.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-3832-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2010
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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