Thoroughly entertaining. Deeply imaginative. Highly recommended.
Waitzkin (The Last Marlin, 2000, etc.) dissects the life of a man who sells himself and other things, sprinkling the narrative with yachts, trophy homes and a cameo by Lenny Bruce.
There’s a nameless narrator, a freelance writer. There’s Jim, the salesman, “tempting and delicious and a little dangerous.” Whether it’s network-marketing, Quonset huts for Canadian farmers or sluicing gold out of the Amazon basin, Jim hones in "on disappointment and avarice” to offer happiness and optimism. It’s 1983. On a Bimini fishing retreat, the two men meet in a seaside bar. Jim is “fast and powerful...and handsome with a worn-out toughness.” The men become friends. As Jim’s story unfolds, mirrored by a narrator about whom little is revealed, readers are immersed in a tale much like a bastard mating of Heart of Darkness and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Forced to support his mother after his father abandons the family, Jim grows up to make one fortune after another, first in pyramid schemes, then selling rugged and practical Quonset huts, and finally robbing gold from the primitive Amazon. He loses fortunes too, walking away from Marvin Gesler, the brains behind the Quonset operation, when he discovered Marvin was skimming a bit off the top. The Amazon saga powers Waitzkin’s novel, where in the garimpo, the gold camp he and his workers have hewed from the jungle, Jim learns both what greed can cost and what it can teach. There he displays a mixture of hubris and loyalty when his foreman Ribamar “a sentinel among fools,” defends the camp against marauders. It’s scene and action, convoluted and complex, worthy of psychoanalysis. There are women—Jim's beautiful wife, Ava, who becomes Lenny’s obsession; Phyllis, compliant second wife; Angela, Brazilian tribal beauty; and most of all, Mara, a decades younger, married Israeli woman, calculating, audacious, preposterous, presumptuous, sensual. Waitzkin offers a singular and haunting morality tale, sophisticated, literary and intelligent.
Thoroughly entertaining. Deeply imaginative. Highly recommended.Pub Date: March 26, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-01136-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2013
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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