A novel at once both sensuous and terrifying.
Marciano (Casa Rossa, 2002, etc.) explores the fractured political landscape of contemporary war-torn Kabul.
Two women—Maria Galante, a photographer and also the narrator, and Imo Glass, a freelance writer—go on a mission to Afghanistan to chronicle one of the unforeseen consequences of war: women who are forced into marriages and who have dealt with this social tradition by attempting to kill themselves by self-immolation. Imo is an experienced and rather cynical observer of the human condition, while Maria has recently been spending her time doing artistic renditions of asparagus quiche for glossy magazines; however, she’s sucked into the maelstrom of a country with a terrible beauty but also with unimaginable social issues. The first third of the novel follows Maria as she takes a training course to help her deal with eventualities she might have to face during her visit to Kabul. She must, for example, learn survival skills to help her deal with the possibility of being kidnapped. After this bracing plunge into political reality, she and Imo find themselves in Kabul, assisted by their driver (and sometime translator) Hanif, a gentle man who’s simply trying to stay alive and make ends meet while his pregnant wife prepares to give birth. Imo is at first the hard-as-nails reporter willing to go to any length to get her story, while Maria is more timid and dewy-eyed. After a disquieting journey to the fierce countryside outside of Kabul, however, both women get into a frightening situation that threatens to spin out of control. This allows Maria to show her strength while Imo is reduced to whimpering, her toughness shown to be a mask covering a more vulnerable self. Toward the end of the novel Maria is told her story needs “a strong image of a suffering, beautiful woman,” and ironically the only image Maria is able to produce is of Hanif’s dying wife.
A novel at once both sensuous and terrifying.Pub Date: May 20, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-375-42510-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2008
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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