A brief yet dense contemplative sketch weighted with spiritual touches.
A fisherman confronts his life, loves, and mortality in this elliptical, somber novella.
The veteran Norwegian novelist Fosse (Aliss at the Fire, 2010, etc.) has a knack for compressing an entire lifetime into a few key moments in a few dozen pages. This book, echoing its title’s evocation of birth and death, opens with the birth of Johannes, an event described in run-on language that captures his father’s anxiety and mother’s exhaustion (“What a good strong boy Johannes yes and to stay in this stay here where nothing else Johannes will be a fisherman like his father”). The prose becomes less abstract in a longer second section that captures Johannes, who indeed became a fisherman, in his old age. But the mood is still unsettled in ways that suggest a ghost story: A widower, he steps out one morning contemplating his long life, seven children, and friendship with Peter, with whom he takes a portentous trip out into a nearby bay. Whether the instability has to do with Johannes' weakened state or something more metaphysical is a question Fosse leaves largely open to the reader; he weaves in mentions of superstitions and questions of God’s existence not so much to deliver direct comments on them but to suggest the ways our thinking flows uncertainly around them. Johannes’ recollections of a young girlfriend, [69] his late wife, [75] and caretaker daughter, Signe, are tender but unromantic—Fosse’s poetic prose implies that the things we love are just out of our grasps. (One paragraph is a riff on whether Signe actually sees him while approaching him.) [89] While Fosse’s writing is easy to admire—Johannes is beautifully depicted—it’s also easy to anticipate the grim place the story is moving toward.
A brief yet dense contemplative sketch weighted with spiritual touches.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62897-108-8
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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