Lackluster studies with little narrative payoff.
Two novellas about erotic obsession, by Israeli author Grossman (Someone to Run With, 2004, etc.).
The first, “Frenzy,” details the strange case of Shaul, an Israeli civil servant. Now 55, he has been married for 25 years to Elisheva, who runs a day care center. Every morning, Elisheva leaves for her ritual swim, ostensibly, but Shaul knows better; she is actually enjoying trysts with Paul, a Soviet Union immigrant she once counseled. This has been going on for ten years, like clockwork. Shaul tolerates the infidelity, mentioning nothing. On a long car ride, he confides all to his sister-in-law Esti, who realizes that the trysts are Shaul’s fantasies. Shaul’s own sex life with his wife has dwindled to the joyless coupling of sleepwalkers, and, as a counterbalance, thinks Esti, he feasts masochistically on encounters that satisfy body and soul, “the essence of his life.” For the reader, Shaul is never more than a case history who needs to get a life, and the other piece, “In Another Life,” is equally contrived. Rotem is an Israeli woman writer who has relocated to London but is now back in Israel to visit her dying mother, Nili. Their relationship has been troubled. Nili was a sometimes neglectful mother who once abandoned Rotem and her sisters to go on a wild-goose chase for a former yoga student. Now, Rotem is reading to her mother her fictional reconstruction of that key episode. In her version, Nili is teaching yoga at a rundown Dead Sea resort when she becomes enchanted by 15-year-old Kobi, a desperately unhappy youth who has attempted suicide. Kobi responds positively to her exercises, which culminate in Nili’s massage of the naked boy. Though the language is drenched in eroticism, the chaste teacher-student prevails in an uncomfortable standoff. Nili never finds her Kobi, but the reconstruction purges mother and daughter of their old resentments.
Lackluster studies with little narrative payoff.Pub Date: May 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-374-17557-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
