From Lebanese writer al-Shaykh (The Story of Zahra, 1994, etc.): a finely wrought epistolary novel of lament and loss that mourns the fate of a beloved city. In ten lengthy letters that, moving back and forth in time, reveal details of lovers, family, and childhood, the 30-ish Asmahan, an architect by profession, records the irrevocable dislocations of the civil war. Asmahan takes no sides; she is writing about the personal, not the political, since, as she admits: ``It no longer interests me to follow the warring factions and put them into categories.'' With bombardments, fears of kidnapping, and pervasive factionalism making work impossible, Asmahan spends time at home with her grandmother, with neighbors, and memories. As she tells good friend Hayat, now living abroad, ``How can I answer your questions about the state of the country when my chief worry is the rat occupying our kitchen?'' In a letter to Jill Morell, the wife of a hostage, she describes how she too resembles the hostages since, like them, she has ``no alternative but to follow the uncomfortable daily routine.'' To Naser, a former lover and activist, she relates the household members' reaction to battles, their escape in a tank, and her memories of their last meeting. And in letters addressed to Beirut itself, her ``Dear Land,'' and Billie Holliday, she describes the changes in the countryside, where drug-dealers have taken over the farms; her grandparents' strained marriage; and her reactions to Jawad, an ÇmigrÇ writer who accuses her of being ``addicted'' to the war. Jawad, she writes, wanted her to go to France with him, but at the last minute she chose to stay: She must still ``confront the city which had made its war die of weariness.'' Appropriately elegiac, but the mood is more poetic than urgent, diminishing its power to affect. Still, lovely measured writing from a voice deserving to be heard.
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-385-47381-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
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
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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