An evocative portrait of a lost girl demanding agency even in the face of death itself.
The abandoned daughter of a famous poet finds her voice beyond the grave.
This phantasmagoric novel by the celebrated Dutch poet Peeters (Maturity, 2011, etc.) is a strange experience, poetic in word and verse but somewhat hesitant about finding its point. Our narrator is Malva Marina Trinidad del Carmen Reyes, Malvie to her friends. Except the real-life Malva never found her voice; the only child of the legendary poet-diplomat and politician Pablo Neruda was born in 1934 with a severe disability caused by hydrocephalus and died in 1943. Not a single line of Neruda’s work is devoted to the child. Here, she writes her story herself through Peeters, able to pass back and forth through time and space. “Oh Hagar, you’ll find out when your time comes: the hereafter is all about going over old ground,” she confesses. Her “afterparty of the dead" is a colorful one, populated by characters that include Oskar Matzerath, “the droll dwarf with the tin drum from the novel by Günter Grass,” as well as James Joyce’s schizophrenic daughter, Lucia, and Arthur Miller’s son, Daniel, who had Down syndrome and who thinks Malva is trying to posthumously earn her father’s love. She also bonds, in a way, with Socrates (a father figure of sorts) and with the late Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, whom Malva secretly aspires to make her grandmother. Stylistically flamboyant prose may overshadow a sadly common theme as both Malva and Peeters explore what it means for a child to be abandoned by a parent. There is some resonance in making reparations for this long-lost daughter. While there’s not much narrative substance here, Malva’s voice is intriguing, having evolved beyond revenge or anger into a deeper acceptance.
An evocative portrait of a lost girl demanding agency even in the face of death itself.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9997544-0-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: DoppelHouse Press
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
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
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