A kaleidoscopic melodrama that earns points for its high-art stylistics, yet still works all the emotions.
Memory can be as much a curse as it is a blessing.
Representing a quantum leap forward from his workmanlike Prisoner in a Red-Rose Chain (2002), Canadian author Moore here turns in a lovely Quebecois opus about people trapped by their memories, or lack thereof. Noel Burun is a hypermnesiac synesthete, meaning he sees words in colors. He also has a near-photographic memory for practically everything he’s experienced since birth; his recall would impress Proust. And like Proust, Noel is lost in the loops of his nostalgia—a single word can send him on an interior rollercoaster of sensory overload: “Noel needed to absorb a person’s voice, experience the distinct colours and shapes, before he could decipher the words themselves.” But Moore isn’t content to simply trap readers in Noel’s funhouse mind. His book—recipient of the 2005 Canadian Authors Association Award for Best Novel—is written as faux reportage, the work of a “professional writer-translator” assigned by the legendary Dr. Vorta to compile the story of Noel (whom Vorta has been studying for years), as well as that of Noel’s Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother and three others. The first is Noel’s complete opposite (and best friend) Norval Xavier Blaquiere, a devastatingly handsome Byronic French aesthete in the midst of a performance-art piece that requires him to screw his way through the alphabet. A potential target for his “S” conquest is Samira Darwish, beautiful, Persian and sort of lost, sublimating her bad-boy attraction to Norval by befriending Noel. Somewhere on the margins is JJ, an overgrown man-boy with a yen for inventions. Through a series of tricky plot devices that would be called cliché if they weren’t so enjoyable, all three end up living with Noel. Moore expends most of his energy on the inner life of the fascinating, dour Noel, but he also has fun with the book’s form, as evidenced in his occasionally humorous use of footnotes.
A kaleidoscopic melodrama that earns points for its high-art stylistics, yet still works all the emotions.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-312-34925-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2006
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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