Smiley (Duplicate Keys, The Age of Grief, etc.) has produced a bulky, sometimes spectacular saga of 14th-century Greenland—a tapestry of hunger, revenge and the disintegration of social institutions. Since the tenth century, Norsemen had farmed and hunted from spring until fall, trying to amass enough food to survive the winters. Smiley's novel plops down at a crucial turning point: the Plague has hit Europe hard, and contact with the continent (as well as the all-important inflow of churchmen) is falling off. Meanwhile, Asgeir Gunnarsson is at odds with his strange neighbors at Ketils Stead. When Asgeir murders a woman he believes to be a witch, the bishop awards the use of his prime field to his hatred rivals. This bitterness trickles down to the next generation—to quiet Gunnar and his sister Margret, whose ancestral stead is eventually usurped by the politically adept Ketils Stead crowd. Winter starvation has always been common, but a vomiting ill and a string of bad hunts prompts widespread death. Amidst the marriages; births and grievances, the bishop dies. The priests are now a low-profile lot, except for former cowherd Larus, who's turning some heads with his apocalyptic visions. And Bjorn Bollason, the lawspeaker, is benevolent and popular at first, but he gets impressed by talky visitors from Iceland and allows them to burn wild Koll-grim, Gunnar's son, at the stake. The annual "Thing" melts down into a bloody melee, pirates plunder and kill, and the saddened Greenlanders bury their dead. Into this icy historical vacuum—the period between the end of outside contact and the eventual disappearance of the Greenland settlers—Smiley pours a thin-broth existence, flavored in spots by dramatic events and complicated emotional relationships. Particularly interesting: the portrayal of the spiritual life as a bleak—and without priests—unconvincing go-round of tithes and half-remembered prayers. Smiley's uninflated prose lulls at first, but gradually accumulates the incantory power of a strange winter-told tale. A bleak, stirring picture of the slow slouch towards the death of a civilization.
Pub Date: April 18, 1988
ISBN: 1400095468
Page Count: 807
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1988
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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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