In this quick and engrossing novel, Green reveals that living and loving are more about embracing failures and making...
Farcical mystery and a heavy dose of pragmatism enliven and ground British writer Green's 1946 off-kilter romance, reissued with an introduction by Deborah Eisenberg.
Charley Summers has returned from the war to a changed London of bombed-out buildings and a snarl of organizations with names reduced to inscrutable initials, with too few clothes and a job that puts him "over a stile which is a mite too high for him." Having lost a leg in France and been held in a German prison camp for four years, he is now tormented by reminders of his lost love, Rose, dead of an illness the same week he was taken prisoner. Pursued to agitation by roses on the vine, in shop windows, the word in conversation, passing and direct, in all its meanings, in songs, in calls across the room to other women of the same name, he is led by Rose's father to her near-double and half sister, the war widow Nancy. A ludicrous case of mistaken identity ensues, through which Green extends the theme of doubles in form and content, with an embedded tale paralleling the larger story and a final scene with Rose's son, whom Charley believes may be his own and in whom he has hopefully sought some trace of himself. As the misunderstandings accrue, Charley's paranoia mounts; thinking he has found himself at the center of a cruel conspiracy, his anxieties—but not his troubles—are assuaged by love in the end. Green questions what it could mean to come "back" from a war that hasn't ended in reality or memory, to a life that cannot be normal, no matter what the affected demand to the contrary. Concerned as Green is with syntactic invention and underlying rhythm, he does not quite succeed in capturing here the tidal nature of grief, but he does brilliantly depict the blatant and the insidious traumas of war, and in more straightforward language than that for which he is often remembered.
In this quick and engrossing novel, Green reveals that living and loving are more about embracing failures and making frequent recalibrations than striving toward unattainable ideals.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 9781681370101
Page Count: 208
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
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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