Beautifully written, perversely entertaining and well worth a close look.
The Booker Prize–winning Irish author’s 15th novel is a (perhaps excessively) droll romantic comedy reminiscent of both Shakespeare’s gossamer romps and Iris Murdoch’s playful metaphysical gameswomanship.
It’s an unexpected offering from the creator of such mordant psychodramas as Ghosts (1993), Eclipse (2001) and Shroud (2003), though mortality and all its disagreeable attributes are its subject. The setting is Arden, the Irish countryside home where renowned mathematician and physicist Adam Godley is dying, consoled by his still-functional mind’s concentration on his pet theory that the existence of an infinity of infinities—and therefore of innumerable multiple worlds for us all to inhabit—is a logical, and hence arguably a literal possibility. Outside “Old Adam’s” thoughts, downstairs Arden houses the patriarch’s son and namesake, young Adam’s super-gorgeous spouse Helen, his paranoid termagant sister Petra (who’s compiling an encyclopedia of indignation and despair) and the siblings’ well-meaning but basically ineffectual mum Ursula. Their somewhat dreary lives are…well, enlivened by the presence of the Greek gods themselves, whose interrelations with humans (notably, the randy Zeus’s, with Helen) are recounted to us in accents of unimpeachable archness by Hermes, messenger to the gods, son of Zeus, and patron of assorted scalawags and doers of misdeeds. Not much happens, alas. But we do get to watch Hermes emulate his dad by seducing the ungodly Godleys’ housekeeper while rather fetchingly disguised. And Petra is so engagingly nasty, we almost wish she had found her way into a play written by Samuel Beckett (whose skeletal prose style broods gently over these pages, along with oodles and scads of Shakespearean echoes). It’s a strange bird of a book, perhaps a cross between Thorne Smith’s caper The Night Life of the Gods and the aforementioned Murdoch at her most inventive (one thinks of her 1969 novel Bruno’s Dream, a brilliant improvisation woven around another old man’s looming death).
Beautifully written, perversely entertaining and well worth a close look.Pub Date: March 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-27279-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
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