Le Tellier examines the possibilities of love after 40, and he deals with this issue with patience, understanding and...
Two love triangles (equal one love hexagon?) that reveal much—or at least enough—about love.
The first complication d’amour involves Thomas Le Gall, a psychiatrist in Paris. He waits for Anna Stein, one of his patients for 12 years and now finally getting ready to end her therapy. Toward the end of this session, she impulsively blurts out that she’s recently met Yves Janvier, a writer whom she finds intriguing. Le Gall duly notes this information and then a few hours later is struck by an erotic thunderbolt of his own in the form of Louise Blum, a lawyer whom he meets at a party and who could be Anna’s “blond twin.” Louise is married to a prominent scientist, Romain Vidal, whom she’s beginning to find lackluster and boring, while Anna is married to Stan, a prominent ophthalmologist. And while both family situations are complicated by children, amatory instincts begin to overtake the better judgment of the adults. Anna and Yves begin an affair, as do Thomas and Louise. French author Le Tellier occasionally and cleverly crosses the threads of his dual plot—e.g., by having Anna and Louise meet each other accidentally while shopping for clothes. And of course Anna makes her developing relationship with Yves (and deteriorating relationship with Romain) part of her confessional sessions with Le Gall. Tellingly, at one point she says, “ 'if I stay with Yves, I’ll have the life I’m dreaming of,’ ” which Le Gall repeats as, “ 'The life you’re dreaming of. You’re dreaming.’ ” Yves writes a short book based on his liaison with Anna Stein (Forty Memories of Anna Stein), which Le Tellier incorporates as part of his novel. Meanwhile, Romain sets up an appointment with Le Gall under an assumed name and uses this occasion to let the psychiatrist know that Romain is not in the dark about the affair Le Gall is engaged in with his wife.
Le Tellier examines the possibilities of love after 40, and he deals with this issue with patience, understanding and bemusement.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59051-399-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2010
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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