Though its suppression of emotion seems a bit studied, this is nonetheless an elegantly structured and stubbornly moving...
Death and alienation hover like menacing theme music over the elliptical scenes that compose this disturbing 2001 novel by Italian author Jaeggy (Sweet Days of Discipline, 1993, etc.).
In a flat affectless narration that careens between numerous past and present scenes, as well as first- and third-person address, Jaeggy’s unnamed narrator focuses on a voyage from Vienna to the Greek Islands and back, undertaken with her widowed German father Johannes. During that voyage—on the Yugoslavian vessel Proleterka (meaning “The proletarian Lass”)—the narrator, who is 15 and has almost from birth been starved for human contact, becomes the willing sexual partner of any crewman who wants her (“By the time the voyage is over, she must know everything”). In skillfully juxtaposed memory scenes, Jaeggy fills in details of Johannes’s financial crises (after his twin brother’s terminal illness forces his formerly wealthy family to sell its textile factory), disastrous marriage, and ostracism from his young daughter by his late wife’s flinty Italian mother Orsola and her secret-riddled family. The narrator’s own feelings emerge from potent surreal memories (e.g., of her mother’s piano as an eerie threatening presence), brisk rejections of emotion and connection (“Parents are not necessary”), and wary characterizations of unknowable people glancingly encountered, on shipboard and in the “ruins” (implicitly compared to sites visited by the ship’s passengers) of her father’s half-buried, submissive life. The novel takes a surprising turn, long after Johannes’s death, when the now-middle-aged narrator is contacted by a moribund elderly man who claims he is her father, and offers her an alternative life (which ironically echoes the losses and sorrows that have made her the remote, stoical woman she is).
Though its suppression of emotion seems a bit studied, this is nonetheless an elegantly structured and stubbornly moving study of innocence destroyed and love denied. Very accomplished indeed.Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2003
ISBN: 0-8112-1550-4
Page Count: 144
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 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 masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.
An ambitious scientific experiment wreaks horrendous toll in the Booker-winning British author’s disturbingly eloquent sixth novel (after When We Were Orphans, 2000).
Ishiguro’s narrator, identified only as Kath(y) H., speaks to us as a 31-year-old social worker of sorts, who’s completing her tenure as a “carer,” prior to becoming herself one of the “donors” whom she visits at various “recovery centers.” The setting is “England, late 1990s”—more than two decades after Kath was raised at a rural private school (Hailsham) whose students, all children of unspecified parentage, were sheltered, encouraged to develop their intellectual and especially artistic capabilities, and groomed to become donors. Visions of Brave New World and 1984 arise as Kath recalls in gradually and increasingly harrowing detail her friendships with fellow students Ruth and Tommy (the latter a sweet, though distractible boy prone to irrational temper tantrums), their “graduation” from Hailsham and years of comparative independence at a remote halfway house (the Cottages), the painful outcome of Ruth’s breakup with Tommy (whom Kath also loves), and the discovery the adult Kath and Tommy make when (while seeking a “deferral” from carer or donor status) they seek out Hailsham’s chastened “guardians” and receive confirmation of the limits long since placed on them. With perfect pacing and infinite subtlety, Ishiguro reveals exactly as much as we need to know about how efforts to regulate the future through genetic engineering create, control, then emotionlessly destroy very real, very human lives—without ever showing us the faces of the culpable, who have “tried to convince themselves. . . . That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter.” That this stunningly brilliant fiction echoes Caryl Churchill’s superb play A Number and Margaret Atwood’s celebrated dystopian novels in no way diminishes its originality and power.
A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.Pub Date: April 11, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4339-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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