A deeply moving meditation on identity and history, the personal and the political, blurring the boundaries between truth...
An extraordinary life in exile inspires a multilayered novel.
With perhaps a nod toward Kafka, Swedish novelist Anyuru (They Will Drown in Their Mothers' Tears, 2019, etc.) opens on a protagonist named only as P facing his interrogators, who ask him, “Why did you come back?” “Back” is to Africa, where P says he has returned with an offer to fly a crop duster in Zambia. He had left his native Uganda some years earlier to train as a fighter pilot in Greece. After Idi Amin staged his coup in 1971 and began executing some of those who had resisted him, P felt he could not return home. Greece, in the midst of its own political upheaval, said he could no longer fly. He had no home to return to in Africa, no home that would accept him in Europe. His passport had become worse than useless; he feared it might provide evidence against him. He has no idea what those holding him think his crimes might be. They have no idea where his loyalty lies. Perhaps he has no idea where his loyalty lies. “If you disappeared one day, just disappeared, who would miss you?” he was asked. And now he knows that no one would. Until a different narrative perspective enters the novel, a first-person narrator that the reader identifies with the author, an unnamed narrator who says that P is his father and that P has been telling him the stories that have filled the novel, stories that the novelist has perhaps embellished, has certainly recast in his own words. Like the father, the son has no country, no place where the marriage of his Swedish mother and Ugandan father, who are now divorced, makes him feel at home. “I travel between places I try to form into a nation,” says the son. “I think about how I am a tree with its roots pulled up.” In other words, like father, like son. The presence of the son signals to the reader that P survived and escaped, that he lived to become a father, while the son’s story illuminates his father’s final days. As the father’s story progresses forward and the son’s looks backward, they meet in a place filled with “all these stories that try to figure out my origins,” says the son. “There is no history. I just come from here. From this summer, when my father is dying.”
A deeply moving meditation on identity and history, the personal and the political, blurring the boundaries between truth and fiction.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64286-044-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: World Editions
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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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