Vivid, shattering, and utterly memorable.
Searing novel, by Iranian exile Djavahery, of love and betrayal in a time of revolution.
“If we were to have a reunion one day, it would have to take place in a cemetery.” In his English-language debut, screenwriter/novelist Djavahery writes pensively of an unnamed young man, just 13 when we meet him, who is hopelessly smitten by his 16-year-old cousin, Niloufar, whose name means “water lily” in Farsi. She is beautiful, with long, black, curly hair and large eyes, and she swims like a dolphin in the cool waters of the Caspian Sea, carefree thanks to prosperous parents who are also members of the Communist Party: “Wealth, power, an elegant mother who looked like a Hollywood starlet…so different from the archetype of our mothers.” Like a figure out of Homer, Nilou also happens to have numerous suitors, two in the lead, one as beautiful as she, the other a klutz with the demeanor of a “beaten dog” whom our narrator lures into a compromising situation that will forever shame him. Not even the arrival of another cousin, half Iranian and half German, who sports “the tiniest bikini on the south coast of the Caspian” can dim the ardor of the local boys for Nilou. Come the revolution of Ayatollah Khomeini a few years later, and all those golden youth face doom. Called into service in the war that soon erupts with Iraq, some are squandered in suicide attacks while Nilou disappears, joining a leftist revolutionary group in Kurdistan, or so the narrator believes. A comrade eventually betrays her, as will her cousin, who, having also joined a Communist cell, decides that he cannot face the torture that is visited on him when he’s captured. At times reminiscent of Giorgio Bassani’s Garden of the Finzi-Continis, Djavahery’s novel is an aching evocation of a paradise lost, one that is impossible to regain, even in our narrator’s searching dreams.
Vivid, shattering, and utterly memorable.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63206-243-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Restless Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
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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