A lyrical, antic, sometimes-plodding embodiment of the complications of self and nationhood.
A man returns to his native Lebanon—and a long history of personal and cultural turmoil—in this panoramic novel.
Arguably Lebanon’s leading literary figure (Yalo, 2008, etc.), Khoury centers this novel on Karim, a dermatologist who’s been enmeshed in the nation’s shifting fortunes throughout the second half of the 20th century. It’s 1989, and he’s been asked by his brother, Nasim, to help start a hospital in Beirut. Karim has lived in a self-imposed exile for years in France with his wife and children, and he’s disinclined to go back, for reasons both political (a distaste for the extremist and sectarian rebels he’d interacted with) and personal (Nasim married his ex-girlfriend, for starters). Karim and Nasim have distinct personalities—upon his return, Karim muses on his various affairs, while Nasim recalls his ineptitude in various pursuits, from college to drug dealing. But Khoury plainly intends them to be archetypes of Lebanon’s struggles to define itself after years (indeed, centuries) of religious sectarianism and civil war. Their father thinks of them as twins (though they were born just less than a year apart), and they serve as mirror images of each other, to pick a metaphor Khoury returns to often. The civil war, for instance, is “an assemblage of broken mirrors…images that reproduce each other but refuse to form a coherent whole.” Khoury fragments the narrative in a similar fashion, sending Karim backward and forward in time to contemplate his childhood, his romantic relationships, religious leaders, and general sense of feeling trapped by the country’s past. These shards of memory aren’t a mess, exactly—Khoury’s prose, via Davies’ translation, is clean and plainspoken—but the time shifting and historical detail often leave the reader feeling whipsawed. (A helpful glossary of significant historical and cultural references is appended.)
A lyrical, antic, sometimes-plodding embodiment of the complications of self and nationhood.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-914671-29-9
Page Count: 500
Publisher: Archipelago
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
IN THE NEWS
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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