A perversely inventive and amusing portrayal of alienation and despair from a highly regarded Romanian author whose work is here translated into English for the first time. It's a chronicle of journeys and encounters, described by first-person narrator Gellu Nauma blocked poet and novelist who ``couldn't care less about literature and words,'' scans the newspapers for reports of bizarre if not paranormal phenomena, and endures meetings and relationships with interestingly deranged people (including several loquacious corpses) who seem to be ingeniously distorted simulacra of people he has loved, tolerated, hated, or fled from. The action, if it is such, ranges from the cramped streets of a surreally reinvented Bucharest to a ``swamp'' to which Naum escapes with his (imaginary) beloved Zenobia, an incarnation of the Woman Spirit that alternately seduces him, sustains him, and scares him half to death. What we're observing, in this uniquely creative comedy of philosophical self-scrutiny, is a flirtation with loneliness, creative sterility, and death, which finds a revivifying counterbalance in the saving disturbances posed by ordinary people and quotidian life (``I needed them, the presence of each and every one, and their words, however stupid, to convince myself that we existed together''). It sounds forbidding, and its curious rhetoric takes some getting used to, but Naum's ingeniously acerbic and paranoid crank (who has a little of Dostoevsky's Underground Man in him) proves himself surprisingly good company. Oddball specificity and intricate generalization coexist smoothly here and give Naum's eloquently cadenced prose both a rich texture and a surprisingly brisk pace. (The translation effectively conveys Naum's penchant for abstractionbut readers may grind their teeth at its occasional misuse of ``like'' for ``as.'') High metaphysical hilarity from a hitherto unknown master whose work in its strongest moments recalls the best of Beckett, Gombrowicz, and Ionesco.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8101-1254-X
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Northwestern Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
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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