A director and screenwriter as well as a novelist, Comencini is adept at creating an extraordinary portrait of...
Two strangers meet in the Italian Dolomites and are equally attracted to and repelled by each other.
Accompanied by her 2-year-old son Marco, Marina takes refuge in northern Italy to sort out her relationship with her husband, which has deteriorated since the birth of their child. There she meets Manfred, a local mountain guide as elemental as the rocky peaks surrounding him. Manfred is, to put it charitably, taciturn, if not morosely uncommunicative. He quickly develops an antipathy toward Marina as being a bad mother, for in a mysterious incident she briefly leaves Marco, who falls and hurts himself. Manfred grudgingly leads Marina up to a remote mountain lodge owned by his family, and there she meets Manfred’s brothers and his sister-in-law, with whom she develops a rapport borne out of their shared roles as mothers. Despite herself, Marina starts to feel drawn to Manfred, estranged from both his wife, whom he’s brutalized, and his two children. She begins to fantasize what intimacy with Manfred would feel like and concludes it would not be for the faint of heart. Then, in an almost psychic episode, Manfred is missing when he’s expected at the lodge, and she impulsively calls the local police, who find him in a crevasse, so he now feels a reluctant obligation to Marina for saving his life. Although they come close to consummating their affair, they never act on their impulses, and Manfred tells Marina to return to her husband. Fifteen years later Marina, driven by curiosity, seeks out Manfred one more time to see what she might have missed.
A director and screenwriter as well as a novelist, Comencini is adept at creating an extraordinary portrait of psychologically scarred characters.Pub Date: April 24, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-59051-511-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
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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