Despite the Dumas-like twists and the hairpin curves of coincidence, a tale narrated with the insistent momentum of a good...
An English translation of Osorio’s award-winning novel about a woman’s struggle to learn the identity of her parents and the mystery of her birth and adoption during Argentina’s “dirty war.”
In the years after a junta took over Argentina (in 1976), some 30,000 political prisoners “disappeared.” One macabre feature of this dread period was that pregnant prisoners were relatively well-treated up to their delivery—then were killed, their children adopted by high-ranking officials. One such orphan is Luz, whose mother, Liliana, had been part of an underground leftist group. Luz’s adoptive mother, Marianna, had given birth to a stillborn child in the same hospital, on the same night Luz was born. Marianna’s father, the dreaded Colonel Alfonso Dufau, sees the hand of fate in the coincidence and promptly orders that Luz be given to Marianna and the stillborn recorded as Liliana’s. The hospital authorities are bribed to comply, Marianna is never told the truth, and Luz grows up in complete ignorance of her true identity. The only flaw in the Colonel’s plan was Miriam Lopez. A sometime prostitute engaged to one of the Colonel’s henchmen, the childless Miriam was the one who’d originally been promised Liliana’s baby, and was later asked to help care for it (and Liliana) until Marianna (who had gone into a coma after her delivery) was released from the hospital. When Miriam learned that Liliana was to be executed as soon as she returned to prison, she tried to help her escape, but they were caught, Liliana was killed, Miriam fled Argentina, and Luz was raised as Marianna’s daughter. Years later, however, Miriam contacts Luz and tells her the truth. Luz then goes about the complicated process of searching for her father, who is still alive, and telling him the story of her life.
Despite the Dumas-like twists and the hairpin curves of coincidence, a tale narrated with the insistent momentum of a good detective story.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2003
ISBN: 1-58234-182-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
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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