Unless Gao’s internationally acclaimed plays are a lot better than his fiction, it’s hard to understand why this writer was...
The experiences of a dissident artist-intellectual who finds himself in an adversary relationship with Mao’s Cultural Revolution are once again examined—if not consistently dramatized—by the Chinese Nobel laureate (Soul Mountain, 2000).
Like that later autobiographical novel, this one (originally published in 1997) is a collage whose unnamed narrator describes at sometimes numbing length his provincial childhood and youth, confusion of familial and political allegiances, career as a successful (if increasingly suspect) writer and artist, and relationships with many, many women, whom he seems to captivate, seduce, and satisfy without half trying. The narrative begins wonderfully, with luminously detailed reminiscences of his tenth birthday party: an idyllic, centered watershed moment in a life soon thereafter to be characterized by fractured relationships and ceaseless wandering. The declared intention, “to describe in simple language the terrible contamination of a life by politics,” is both realized and occluded by its odd organization—as a story told by him to Margarethe, the German woman who becomes his lover during a period of self-exile in Hong Kong, which employs second-person direct address to himself while he is thus (and elsewhere) exiled, and omniscient narration to describe his past in China. The story is valuable for its vivid piecemeal picture of 20th-century China’s culture of revisionist egoism, paranoia, and repression, especially in segments that focus on the imperiled activities of a “rebel Red Guard group” of which the narrator is a leader. And there is admirable dramatic intensity in the stories of Qian, a fugitive woman met by chance who impulsively (and unwisely) marries the narrator, and Sun Huirong, a naïve village girl who is raped, disbelieved, and summarily condemned to “re-education.” Otherwise, alas, One Man’s Bible is repetitive, discursive, and declamatory to a degree that leaches away far too much of the drama inherent in its content.
Unless Gao’s internationally acclaimed plays are a lot better than his fiction, it’s hard to understand why this writer was awarded a Nobel Prize.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-621132-8
Page Count: 464
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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