Put a cracked cup in scalding water and it will shatter; put a man of divided allegiances in a divided country at a divided time, and perhaps he'll break; or perhaps he'll stand up to it, leading a double life, like Eberhard Starusch, West Berlin professor, dunderhead to his students, playboy terrorist in his fantasies, the fortyish tragicomic hero of Gunter Grass' quarrelsome and brilliant new novel. "Nothing lasts. There will always be pain"—there are Starusch's final words after recounting for us, from his dentist's chair, his mouth full of symbolic decay, what it's like experiencing Germany in 1967, the Right beyond contempt, and the Left, idolizing Che and Bob Dylan, increasingly idiotic: which way should the humanist and socialist turn, how should he wage the good fight? This, of course, is Gunter Grass' dilemma, one he has been wrangling with, publicly and politically, over the last years; here the schizoid imagination of Starusch, coupled with the fanatical sprightliness, but no less melancholy, style with which it is expressed, surely mirrors Grass' own troubled state, making Local Anaesthetic the wildest and most personal of his impressive works. The other characters, while lacking the tour de force dimensions of Starusch, are nevertheless more than adequate adjuncts to the curiously dazzling and ironic improvisations which give the book both its maniacal tempo (a bit similar to Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five) and deeply contemporary, befuddled nerve. An achievement.
Pub Date: March 25, 1970
ISBN: 0156529408
Page Count: -
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace & World
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1970
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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