An initially ungainly but ultimately poised consideration of war’s long impact on feeling and faith.
An elderly Belgian woman takes a bittersweet look back on her war-torn youth, deliberately (and queasily) blending carnage and romance.
Helena, the narrator of Mortier’s third novel translated into English, opens her story with extended ruminations on old age and loss—we know that her parents are dead, as are her husband, daughter and brother, though the circumstances aren’t initially made clear. Her woolly, quasi-Proustian musings on time and God test the reader’s patience, and it’s not until about 100 pages in that her story—and the reasons she postponed telling it—comes more clearly into view. At the beginning of World War I, she moved with her mother from their bourgeois family enclave in Flanders to the home of some relatives in France, where they’re safer but still close to the shelling. During one assault, the pair are comforted by a British army photographer, Matthew, whom Helena promptly falls for. Her reminiscences about her sexual awakening with him gain a gauzy eroticism that’s pitted against her memories of the grotesque impact of the war. In the latter mode, Mortier is superb, particularly in one set piece describing the death of a young girl in detail, from her playing dress-up to getting killed by a stray piece of shrapnel to Helena’s role in carrying and preparing her body for burial. The push and pull of ugliness and beauty Helena witnessed plays into her conviction about humanity’s random and godless state of existence, as the title suggests: “give us back our mealy-mouthed petit-bourgeois world,” she writes, knowing that such comforts have been stripped from her. And as the novel moves toward its mordant close, Mortier gives Helena’s hard edges a moral and emotional justification—a strong closing that justifies its wobbly beginning.
An initially ungainly but ultimately poised consideration of war’s long impact on feeling and faith.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-78227-017-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
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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