Superbly imagined first novel by a former Marine captain who was also the screenwriter for Bob Fosse's Cabaret, which was based on Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin. Nebenzal knows prewar Berlin like his own moles. For 12 years Daniel Saporta, a Sephardic Jew masquerading as a Spaniard named Daniel Salazar, runs the Klub Kaukasus in Berlin at the height of its decadence. And Klub Kaukasus is as decadent and colorful a cafe as you might ever hope to lose your virtue in. Especially nifty are Daniel's Turkish, Armenian, and Egyptian belly dancers (many of whom were parentally declitorized in pubescence) whose dances and orgasmically rippling bellies excite the high-styled clientele. The Klub is a fabulous success, and Nebenzal's knowledge of how to run such a club, keep the girls in line, and the show fresh is detailed with headspinning authenticity. One can't praise enough this novel's Nabokovian, termite-like detail, no matter what area of life it enters into: Middle Eastern Jewish life, German military life, the endless levels of a Pan-European capital's society, national varieties of cuisine, or the types of mentality of its characters. Daniel raises a streetwise former doorman, Lohmann, to be his second-in-command, and Lohmann's gratitude for being lifted out of the lower classes is one of the novel's most moving themes. But war comes; the club's Russian fare falls into the ersatz and makeshift; the high life departs; even the dancers are listless; and only Nazi toadies and functionaries fill the tables. Then Daniel is drafted unwillingly into helping the underground: The Germans have extended the Final Solution to the Middle East, with their Arab cohorts massacring Jews. Daniel must sacrifice his beloved Samira, a dancer, so she can become a spy servicing a Nazi pervert—and a rich scene it is when he givers her these orders. After a strong start, it gets only better.
Pub Date: Sept. 28, 1992
ISBN: 0-87951-458-2
Page Count: 290
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
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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