An engrossing collection about the brutality and confusion of the Vietnam War.
A debut collection of fiction and nonfiction ruminates on the Vietnam War and other calamities.
The fog of war fills every page of this volume, preventing clarity and necessitating an uncertain, grasping speculation on the part of everyone involved: characters, readers, and author. The nonfiction section is dominated by Tiffany’s “Vietnam Anti-Memoirs,” a novella-length series of essays accounting for different periods in the life of an Army combat medic who served in the war: witnessing an unintentional massacre of civilians in 1966; searching for accurate representations of the conflict in the books and movies made in the following decades; returning to the country in the ’90s in search of closure. The fiction section features two stories set during the war. “Saigon Passional” tells the tale of a member of the Women’s Army Corps working in the Army Mortuary, where she must see to the body of a Green Beret who bears strange wounds reminiscent of a crucifixion. The title story follows a Special Forces sergeant assigned to guard the wife of an American dignitary in the early days of the war. Other fictional tales are set in Frederick the Great’s Berlin and ancient Rome, but the shadow of Vietnam hangs over even these unrelated stories. Tiffany has a fine eye for the surreal, locating and highlighting the most startling aspects of a given scenario. The author is at his best when he offers direct descriptions and stark images, as here, where a medic tends to the wounds of the civilians his countrymen have just shot: “They cowered in their pain, seeming to await further brutality. They were even sheepish in their agony. As he toiled over the wounds he repeated again and again, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ They shrunk from his words.” The nonfiction pieces generally work better than the fiction ones, as Tiffany’s essayistic tendencies sometimes clutter the stories’ pages and weigh down the narrative momentum. Even so, there is an odd cohesion to the book. Fiction and nonfiction seem to blur even within individual pieces, and an aesthetic of fragmentation hovers above all. The author may not have solved the problem of how to write about the Vietnam War, but this volume seems a step in the right direction.
An engrossing collection about the brutality and confusion of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-578-65051-7
Page Count: 293
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A vibrant tale of a remarkable woman.
Who was Shakespeare?
Move over, Earl of Oxford and Francis Bacon: There’s another contender for the true author of plays attributed to the bard of Stratford—Emilia Bassano, a clever, outspoken, educated woman who takes center stage in Picoult’s spirited novel. Of Italian heritage, from a family of court musicians, Emilia was a hidden Jew and the courtesan of a much older nobleman who vetted plays to be performed for Queen Elizabeth. She was well traveled—unlike Shakespeare, she visited Italy and Denmark, where, Picoult imagines, she may have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—and was familiar with court intrigue and English law. “Every gap in Shakespeare’s life or knowledge that has had to be explained away by scholars, she somehow fills,” Picoult writes. Encouraged by her lover, Emilia wrote plays and poetry, but 16th-century England was not ready for a female writer. Picoult interweaves Emilia’s story with that of her descendant Melina Green, an aspiring playwright, who encounters the same sexist barriers to making herself heard that Emilia faced. In alternating chapters, Picoult follows Melina’s frustrated efforts to get a play produced—a play about Emilia, who Melina is certain sold her work to Shakespeare. Melina’s play, By Any Other Name, “wasn’t meant to be a fiction; it was meant to be the resurrection of an erasure.” Picoult creates a richly detailed portrait of daily life in Elizabethan England, from sumptuous castles to seedy hovels. Melina’s story is less vivid: Where Emilia found support from the witty Christopher Marlowe, Melina has a fashion-loving gay roommate; where Emilia faces the ravages of repeated outbreaks of plague, for Melina, Covid-19 occurs largely offstage; where Emilia has a passionate affair with the adoring Earl of Southampton, Melina’s lover is an awkward New York Times theater critic. It’s Emilia’s story, and Picoult lovingly brings her to life.
A vibrant tale of a remarkable woman.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9780593497210
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
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
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