An appealingly chaotic—if familiar—look at the inner life of a young “intellectual.”
A coming-of-age novel set in Moscow, Erades’ debut plays with tropes of student life, literary devotion, and travel.
Oh, to be a young student in love in Moscow, where the girls are angelic and the air smells of…what’s that? Gun powder? Petrol? Vomit? The Moscow that Martin has come looking for doesn’t quite exist anymore. A lover of literature—though also a young man who fakes his way through a lot of reading—he romanticizes an old-world Russian glamour, but in his case, he mostly just falls from bar to bar, bounces from romance to romance. Erades smartly breaks his novel into sections that begin with a description of a famous woman from Russian literature, and these literary women echo the “real” women Martin meets—and is largely unable to understand as human beings, not just figures ripped from pages. Yes, Martin may be playing the role of intellectual, but often these relationships devolve into…well, how would Martin put it? “Fuck you.” (Would Chekhov have said the same?) Martin has a lot of growing up to do, but Erades is always mature, even when his protagonist isn’t, which makes the novel feel different from Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise or other coming-of-age stories written while the authors themselves were coming of age. By setting this book in Russia, Erades blunts some of his character’s narcissism: there’s always the shadow of history to contend with. “I thought how different my Moscow was from Chekhov’s Moscow,” Martin muses, going on to describe the “enormous amalgam of buildings and squares and wide avenues.” The novel feels a bit like such an amalgam too, and the worst you could say about it is that it’s untidy, too unruly, too desultory. But then again, Erades’ structure mimics the movement of Martin through the city, through his life—always yearning yet not always heading in the right direction.
An appealingly chaotic—if familiar—look at the inner life of a young “intellectual.”Pub Date: May 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8654-7837-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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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