It follows two other fictional treatments of real people: Ravel (2007) and Running (2009), about the Czech runner Zátopek....
The latest, very short novel from the French Echenoz profiles the eccentric genius of electrical engineering, Nikola Tesla.
It follows two other fictional treatments of real people: Ravel (2007) and Running (2009), about the Czech runner Zátopek. Tesla (1856-1943) is called Gregor here. His early days as a Serb in southeastern Europe are dealt with briskly. He’s “precociously unpleasant," and from the start his projects are large-scale, even grandiose. He’s 28 when he leaves for America and is hired by Edison as a troubleshooter; he invents a generator for alternating current which Edison embraces though refuses to pay him for. Soon after, the majority shareholders of his own company stiff him after his invention of an arc lamp. Clearly, Gregor is no businessman. He goes to work for Westinghouse, Edison’s rival, at Western Union; his lectures on alternating current draw huge audiences and make him a celebrity. Yet he remains intensely private and has extraordinary quirks. He is obsessed by the number three. He is beset by phobias: germs, hair, jewelry. Women adore him, but he stays celibate, reserving his affection for pigeons. Yes, dirty old pigeons—only with them is there real communication. This is a wholly unsentimental portrait of a freaky inventor. Our sympathy is not required; all Echenoz requires is our attention, which he secures through his lapidary prose, buffed to a high gloss in this excellent translation. The omniscient narrator shows Olympian detachment coupled with wry humor. Gregor’s ups and downs continue. He lives large at the Waldorf, but his latest patron J.P. Morgan turns him loose after Marconi appropriates his patent for radio, the result of a dirty trick perpetrated by Gregor’s nemesis, a nobody called Napier. This key development is merely outlined, a disappointment for readers hungry for dramatic flourishes. At the end of his long life, all Gregor has are his pigeons, and even they will turn on him.Pub Date: June 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59558-649-0
Page Count: 144
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2011
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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