Extraordinarily clever, and quite moving. A brilliant US debut.
Impersonation, mistaken identity, and subterfuge are the elements juggled with hellish precision in this dizzyingly intricate historical, the first of its prizewinning Mexican author’s to appear in English translation.
The byzantine structure defies brief summary, but suffice it to say that four narrators’ overlapping stories cohere to chronicle a history of deceptions that reaches back to WWI and forward to the postwar pursuit and capture of fugitive Nazis. First, German soldier-engineer Franz Kretzschmar describes the chess game, played onboard a train approaching the eastern front in 1918, which enabled Austrian Thadeus Dreyer to “win” the identity of railwayman Viktor Kretzschmar, elude military service, and survive, only to commit a horrendous crime when his hidden past threatened to overtake him. Seminarian Richard Schley confesses his assumption of the identity of (the false) Dreyer, whom Schley had recognized as his (Jewish) childhood friend. Still with us? Alikoshka Goliadkin (his surname borrowed from Dostoevsky’s labyrinthine novella The Double) relates his later wartime experiences as “Dreyer’s” subordinate, particularly regarding the “Amphitryon Project,” Dreyer’s scheme to train ordinary soldiers to “stand in” for prominent Nazi officers, thus shielding the latter from assassination attempts. Finally, “ghost writer” (well, why not?) Daniel Sanderson, a trained cryptographer, connects the murder of Polish Baron Blok-Cussewsky (who, unsurprisingly, is other than he seems) with the fate of (the false) Kretzschmar père, and raises the strong possibility that it was not “the real” Adolf Eichmann who was extradited, tried, and convicted, and executed in Jerusalem. It’s all devilishly hard to follow, but increasingly engrossing—and the payoff is a wonder to behold.
Extraordinarily clever, and quite moving. A brilliant US debut.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-374-26190-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
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
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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