A thoughtful, earnest first novel: it doesn't take any risks but sticks faithfully to its affecting mark.
It’s hard not to like this lyrical, gently paced debut that confronts the terrible legacy carried by children of trauma and tragedy.
Paula Perel and her older brother Julian bear the anguish of their father's Holocaust memories in vastly different ways: Paula sublimates her personality by becoming a professional singer of lieder (although forbidden by her father to sing in German), while Julian, a grad student in physics, retreats into the antisocial and deafening silence of his eleven TV sets. Now orphaned and living on their own on two floors of a Berkeley apartment, Paula must leave on a Grand Tour to make a name for herself in Europe; she invites her cleaning lady, Sola Ordonio, to stay and keep an eye on her paranoid, solitary brother, who lives upstairs. Sola, a 30ish political refugee from an unnamed South American country where, years before, she witnessed the massacre of her family, brings Julian his lunch and picks up plates. Gradually, the sympathy between the two emotionally diffident characters grows. Rosner takes excruciating pains to weave the threads of her narrative in alternating points of view, and the slow-moving action back in forth in time is examined in many tireless facets. Rosner has an expert command of her material (she herself is the child of Holocaust survivors), from the Hungarian Jewish father's past as a Sonderkommando at Auschwitz and Sola's terrifying memories of witness to the nuances of opera singing. And everywhere poet Rosner exhibits her care in the use of language, such as the comparison of a piano, its cover closed and keys hidden, to a woman “ashamed to show her teeth when she smiles.”
A thoughtful, earnest first novel: it doesn't take any risks but sticks faithfully to its affecting mark.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-345-44224-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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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