Reminiscent of both Antonioni's classic film L'Avventura and Murakami's own Norwegian Wood (2000): an irresistibly plaintive...
This latest from the acclaimed Japanese author of A Wild Sheep Chase (1989) and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1997) is an equally deft and affecting dramatization of recent postwar alienation and anomie.
Narrated by an unnamed student and schoolteacher, it chronicles his frustrating relationship with Sumire, a headstrong young woman devoted to Jack Kerouac and the Beats and determined to make her way as a novelist. Their story is set in 1957, as Russia's satellite Sputnik travels through space—an image explicitly connected to Sumire's partially unrequited love for Miu, the (older, married) Korean woman who becomes her employer, mentor, and traveling companion. An urgent phone message summons the narrator to an island off the coast of Greece, whence Sumire has inexplicably disappeared—and to extended conversations with the bereft Miu, whose disclosures only intensify the narrator's resigned realization that people who attempt, then neglect or fail to achieve, intimacy are themselves "in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal on their own separate orbits." The mystery of Sumire resists solution, despite partial explanations suggested by Miu's haunting story of being trapped in a Ferris-wheel car at a Swiss amusement park, evidence contained in disks found in Sumire's computer (which indicate that she has moved on, to "the other side" of her personality, and possibility), and a teasing climactic episode in which the narrator involves himself in the fate of his married lover's young son (who's also his student), when the latter is caught shoplifting. Nothing is spelled out, but worlds of implication exfoliate from this stunning, beautifully structured novel: a moving depiction of the mystery of other people, ever capable of "disappearing" into "places" where we cannot, try as we may, follow them.
Reminiscent of both Antonioni's classic film L'Avventura and Murakami's own Norwegian Wood (2000): an irresistibly plaintive dramatization of the differences and distances that preclude and frustrate the human need for connection.Pub Date: April 30, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-41169-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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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