A story we cannot hear too many times is grippingly retold in this blistering report from hell on earth. Wander’s legacy...
The experiences of Galician Holocaust survivor Wander, who died in 2006, are starkly fictionalized in this lyrical novel originally published in East Germany in 1970.
The episodic narrative chronicles hardship and an endangered culture’s communal will to survive. It is presented by an unnamed narrator who honors his comrades in suffering by describing their ordeals and retelling their stories. Wander’s resonant title, taken from a 16th-century poem by Rabbi Loew of Prague, offers an image of unshakeable faith—as do the prisoners whom we encounter at Auschwitz, during an arduous mountain crossing in flight from the Nazis’ enemies, and at Buchenwald—where the first things the arriving prisoners see are “stacks” of dead bodies. The details may be (alas) familiar, but their cumulative power is considerable. Comparisons to both classic concentration-camp memoirs and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich are as justly earned as they are inevitable. Among the most memorable of the narrator’s companions: “storyteller” Mendel Teichmann, an ironical atheist who nevertheless confirms his hearers’ stubborn hopefulness indomitable; “Parisian laborer and resistance fighter” Jacques; rich farmer Meir Bernstein, who stoically refuses to believe that everything will be taken from him; and teenaged Tadeusz Moll, who eventually runs out of the astonishing good luck that had magically attached to him. A slight tendency toward sentimental oversimplification is effectively balanced by Wander’s gift for understatement (wonderfully rendered by Hofmann’s beautiful translation). And no reader will be unmoved by lucid homespun metaphors (e.g., “Mornings when a sun comes up bloody as out of a battle”) or such scenes as a “demonstration against barbarism” accomplished by “educated” prisoners discussing favorite literary works.
A story we cannot hear too many times is grippingly retold in this blistering report from hell on earth. Wander’s legacy thus becomes a gift bequeathed to all of us.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-393-06538-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2007
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
