A pleasantly suspenseful narrative delivered in competent but unnuanced English.
In this fictionalized memoir from the Romanian author and professor, a Romanian refugee flees the Ceausescu regime and becomes a professor of languages and theater in America.
Mona comes from a long line of strong Romanian women, beginning with her great-grandmother, who floats down a flood-swollen river and marries her rescuer. At 17, Mona meets the love of her life, raven-haired, green-eyed Mihai, while vacationing in the Carpathian Mountains. Mercurial Mihai’s last girlfriend was killed (accidentally, or perhaps not) by a rock kicked loose by Mihai while the two were hiking in the foothills. Between trysts with Mihai, Mona observes the contradictions of life under the Ceausescus—the dictator tag team of Nicolae and Elena. Public education is excellent—Mona’s high school has imparted a firm grounding in languages, comparative literature and classical music. However, the food shortages, empty store shelves and long lines plaguing so many Cold War-era eastern bloc countries oppress Romanians, including Mona’s linguistics professor father and poet mother, almost as much as constant surveillance by the Securitate (secret police) who slouch menacingly in the shadows of city streets and cafés. As the Securitate net tightens around Mona’s father, a member of a dissident group, her parents resolve to get her out. This will entail leaving Mihai, who lately has been spouting Party lines with unaccustomed fervor. Escaping via Yugoslavia into Italy, she’s sheltered by two Italian families who aid her passage to America. The section set in America is perforce less gripping than the Romanian scenes, and Radulescu glosses over her protagonist’s troubled marriage to an American psychologist, as well as the ensuing divorce and child-custody wrangling. After Mona’s parents join her in America they have the satisfaction of watching Ceausescu’s fall (and Christmas Day impromptu execution) on television. An immigrant cousin informs Mona of Mihai’s death. Finally, 40-something Mona makes her way home for a long overdue investigation of Mihai’s true character.
A pleasantly suspenseful narrative delivered in competent but unnuanced English.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-26823-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
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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