Aria on adolescence written in Singer's old age, set familiarly in the post-WW II Warsaw ghetto. Nobelist Singer was his own man, but his triumph here is much like Dostoyevsky's in his later years when he wrote A Raw Youth and tapped the mad feel of his teens, though it's also modeled on Knut Hamsun's Hunger, a more intense but less lively story than Singer's. Singer's hero is David Bendiner, 19, a penniless and starving writer whose only claim to fame is an unpublished manuscript, Spinoza and the Cabala. David's brother Isaac, five years older, already belongs to Warsaw's Writers Club and seems a portrait of Singer's older brother, the novelist Israel Joshua Singer. David has lost a teaching job in his small home village, where he trips over his fate on every page. A dealer in certificates for traveling to Palestine accepts David as a wonderful choice for marrying him off to Minna Ahronson, the 24-year-old daughter of a once wealthy bankrupt; she wants to follow her lover, the indescribably romantic Zbigniew Shapira, to Palestine. Britain allows married Poles to bring their wives into the new nation, where the brides are then divorced and go their own way. Getting the certificate means cutting through expensive red tape and hangs over much of the novel. Throughout, Singer writes in a strikingly flesh, direct manner that allows for songful translation: "Night had fallen and lights were shining on the sidewalks. Mannequins in the store windows were dressed in the latest fashions. The moon swam across the sky. The stars seemed to ignite over the tin rooftops." Underclothed and with holes in his shoes, the star-crossed David spends the winter largely in a frigid, dark room, trudges about meeting people in distress, tries to stay alive while making sense of an unfathomably hostile universe crisscrossed with stupefying laws, politics, philosophies, manifestos, and religions. Singer's farewell? A Chaplinesque one, done with gusto and panache.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-12029-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
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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