Delightful and original.
A famous novelist’s disappearance upends the life of her American translator.
Novey's surreal debut begins as a mystery: legendary Brazilian writer Beatriz Yagoda has inexplicably climbed into an almond tree with a cigar and a suitcase and has not been seen since. Upon receiving the news—is she aware, an unfamiliar emailer wants to know, that her author has been missing for five days?—translator Emma Neufeld puts her life in Pittsburgh on hold and hops a flight to Rio de Janeiro to join the search, much to the chagrin of her sweetly dull boyfriend. On the ground in Rio, the situation quickly begins to clarify: Beatriz Yagoda is not only a serious literary novelist, but also a serious online poker player who now owes an angry loan shark half a million dollars, or else. And so, together with Yagoda’s adult children, Raquel (practical) and Marcus (overwhelmingly handsome), Emma embarks on a madcap chase to track down the missing author while fending off the increasingly impatient shark. Meanwhile, Yagoda’s publisher, Roberto Rocha, burned out by a sea of lesser manuscripts and desperate for another one of hers, finds himself equally entangled: he doesn’t know any more about her whereabouts than Emma and the rest, but he’s been the one responding to her secret requests for cash, and—more importantly—he’s the one with the means to pay off her debts. Stylish, absurd, sometimes romantic, and often very funny, the novel is as much about the writing process as it is about the high-stakes plot. And if it doesn’t always add up to more than the sum of its parts—like a dream, the book is almost overwhelmingly vivid when you’re in it, and the details dissipate quickly when you’re not—taken piece by piece, it’s a tour de force.
Delightful and original.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-316-29849-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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BOOK REVIEW
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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
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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