Slow-moving and elaborate, by modern tastes: but a founding work of modern Portuguese literature, hailed by José Saramago as...
A 19th-century Portuguese epic is finally put into readable modern English, revealing a strange tale of decline and fall.
Eça (1845–1900) was a liberal in conservative Portugal, a litterateur who spent much of his adult life in willing exile as a minor diplomat in France, Cuba and England, “that land of heretics and…barbarous language,” as the materfamilias of the da Maia family has it. The da Maias are wealthy and influential, recognized throughout the country guided by a patriarch of enlightened sentiment who despises his son’s attachment to a woman who, he thunders, “is the daughter of a murderer and a slave-trader.” With that schism, the family weakens, until finally its foremost member is a dilettantish doctor, Carlos da Maia, who, with his scampish friend Ega, chases around the capital looking for various pleasures while philosophizing, drinking and amounting to not much of anything. The two flâneurs are fond of gossip, rivalries, even feuds, and of twitting the bourgeoisie and flouting convention with talk of the “so-called Christ” and a future without vegetables, “merely a remnant of man’s coarse animality.” Lisbon, alas, is a small pond even for such small fish. Carlos withdraws into a passionate relationship with a woman who has a daughter and has spent some time in the company of men for pay. As it develops, that is the least of the scandals surrounding her. The entanglements are worthy of Jane Austen, though much seamier, and they point toward the beginnings of the decadent apathy that would soon turn into totalitarianism. Think of it as a Portuguese Buddenbrooks, with a foretaste or two of Doctor Zhivago—save that where Pasternak’s novel ends with its doctor hero running away from a trolley, Eça’s has its doctor hero chasing after one.
Slow-moving and elaborate, by modern tastes: but a founding work of modern Portuguese literature, hailed by José Saramago as a masterwork.Pub Date: July 30, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8112-1649-4
Page Count: 640
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2007
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
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