An intriguing premise, but both characters and plot are bewilderingly and disconcertingly ambiguous.
Residents of a small mountain town in Romania are bewildered by the discovery of a mass grave in journalist Florian’s fiction debut.
No one knows either the age or the origins of the bones found near the site of an old Roman fort, so the local policemen dutifully cart them off to be examined by the coroner. One rumor that seems plausible is that this was a site of a communist massacre. Major Maxim, leader of the local police, provides full access to the media; he wants to solve the mystery...or so it seems. Alternatively, it may be that he’s just barely clinging to his job and thinks answers about the mass grave will make him a hero. An archeologist named Mr. Petrus also seems on track to figure out the enigma, but his investigations are sidetracked by his amorous attraction to Jojo, granddaughter of Auntie Jenny, who years before had fallen in love with British businessman Lord Embury. Petrus begins a double life, carrying on an affair with Jojo while deceiving Auntie Jenny into believing that the young woman is in Bucharest taking exams. Florian frequently shifts narrative gears, following first one character and then another, and while he seems comfortable with this constant relocation, it’s somewhat dizzying for the reader. We’re abruptly introduced to Auntie Paulina, for example, who reads coffee grounds and begins “treating the signs in the coffee grounds as commandments.” Then it’s on to meet a man named Gherghe, who escapes from a prison camp and reinvents himself as a monk named Onufrie, convinced that the Virgin Mary descends from the skies to help him recover his health. Onufrie eventually begins the burial service at the mass grave and earns praise from a newspaper headlined, “A Monk Blesses the Bones of the Martyrs.”
An intriguing premise, but both characters and plot are bewilderingly and disconcertingly ambiguous.Pub Date: July 23, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-15-101514-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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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