Elegant, engrossing, ornately constructed: both an engaging love story and a portrait of an entire age.
A splendid debut about a pair of star-crossed lovers in ninth-century Baghdad.
There are certain stories that are shared by every culture in the world, and unhappy love is one of them. Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, Pocohantas and Captain Smith, Madame Butterfly and Pinkerton—and now, thanks to Horch, Schemselnihar and Abulhassan Ali. Their names may not trip quite as gracefully from the tongue, but such are the difficulties of translation from the Arabic. Our narrator is one Ibn Thaher, a pharmacist and scholar in ancient Baghdad who became an intimate friend of the Sultan’s (having provided contraceptive potions that kept the royal harem from producing too many princes and thereby sparing the realm from civil war) and one of the most honored men of the city. Thaher’s shop is frequented by many of the Sultan’s wives, but one in particular, Schemselnihar, is a regular customer. Free-spirited and independent, Schemselnihar travels openly without escorts (scandalous behavior for a Muslim woman) and is even seen in the company of other men. One of these, the Persian Prince Abuhassan Ali, becomes her lover, and she and Ali try to find a way to run away together. Adultery with one of the Sultan’s wives brings certain death to all concerned, so the couple turns to Thaher for help in making their escape. Though fearful and naturally reluctant to betray his lord and risk his own head, Thaher relents and becomes an accomplice to the Prince’s scheme. New Yorker Horch, now based in Brazil, flavors his narration with a vivid portrait of ancient Baghdad and Islamic culture, a world of extraordinary grace and brutal cruelty in which the will of one man can run roughshod over an entire populace. Can the Sultan be defeated by one couple in love? It’s not very likely—but there are precedents.
Elegant, engrossing, ornately constructed: both an engaging love story and a portrait of an entire age.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-28418-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
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
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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