Still, a well-crafted, meditative piece.
A thoughtful, tempered debut, with a hint of folk tale, about a virgin who weaves magic carpets.
Though Turkey in the 1950s was on the verge of becoming a modern nation, the small mountain village still lived an isolated existence. In one such remote place lives Nurdane, a young woman and famed weaver crippled by polio. Supernatural properties are said to emanate from her impossibly perfect rugs: sick animals recover when laid on them, and people are healed by the simple act of possession, but, most importantly, brides who have her rugs beneath them will conceive male heirs. When Nurdane was a young girl, her father Ali (her mother died in childbirth) taught her to weave in compensation for her atrophied legs. Now, all believe that Allah speaks through her prayer rugs, and competition is fierce in the village to win the auctions held for them. Her lot in life, weaving rugs for brides’ dowries, offers a cruel irony, for according to tradition (a tradition it appears her father invented in order to protect his daughter) she must remain pure to weave. Enter two men: Adam, Nurdane’s doctor, who is set, with Ali’s blessing, to marry her; and Hennessey, an American anthropologist digging in the village for evidence of an ancient goddess cult. The beautiful but crippled Nurdane has both Adam’s pitying love and Hennessey’s adoration—for it seems that the primitive symbols in her rugs substantiate his hypothetical claims. The tale’s being filled with men—Nurdane’s father, her two suitors, a cousin, a young boy, thieves sent to steal from her—provides an interesting assertion of the status of this woman, illiterate and without rights, yet venerated by a village of men. Payne keeps the story simple, elemental, and reserved, emphasizing the timeless quality of the tragic tale, though her choice also seems at times to distance the reader from the inner lives of the characters.
Still, a well-crafted, meditative piece.Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-525-94657-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2002
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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