Readers may be reminded of Alan Sillitoe’s “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner,” perhaps also of John Knowles’s A...
The metaphor of rowing gathers a rich nexus of meanings in this terse, haunting novel, the first from yet another accomplished writer from the Netherlands.
It’s the story of a relationship that is and isn’t a friendship, narrated by Anton, a young resident of Amsterdam, as he revisits the destroyed places where he had spent his youth, on the eve of the city’s liberation during the waning days of the WWII. Anton specifically recalls the summers of 1938 and 1939, when he found relief from the drab life circumscribed by his father’s job as a train station attendant and their unlovely home (“the roof that the housing corporation had given us . . . also shut out light and air”) in joining a posh rowing “club” and pairing with David, a child of wealth and privilege, under the tutelage of their enigmatic German coach Dr. Schneiderhahn. Van den Brink telescopes much of what occurs outside the “world” of the club and the river, deftly contrasting Anton’s nostalgic reveries with brief glimpses of the havoc that had spread even to the lavish home where David (whose later fate is not disclosed) had seemed safe, if not invulnerable. Anton’s plaintive yearning for “the strange life on the water that we shared” expresses both his unrealized hope for a fuller life and a subtly suggested confession of his borderline-sexual infatuation with the charismatic, somewhat distant David (a possibly mutual attraction also embedded in a story David tells, about separated Platonic “halves” forever seeking reunion), while also offering a muted lament for windswept, perfect summer days, part of the beauty decimated by Hitler’s inexorable momentum. The novel’s elegiac tone is effectively varied by van den Brink’s obviously knowledgeable re-creations of the experiences of oarsmen, which culminate in a vividly described climactic championship race.
Readers may be reminded of Alan Sillitoe’s “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner,” perhaps also of John Knowles’s A Separate Peace. Still, On the Water is a work of real originality, and a fine introduction to a splendid new novelist.Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8021-1692-2
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
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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