A thoroughly intellectual postmodern fable, wise yet melancholy, meant to be read slowly and savored.
In Levi’s (A Guide to the Perplexed, 1992) long-awaited second novel, a failed Ph.D. candidate, expelled from Cambridge’s Trinity College, learns he’s king of Septimania, the land given to the Jews of eighth-century France by Charlemagne.
It’s 1978. Malory, an accomplished organist and tuner, is approached by pale and fragile young Louiza, a mathematical genius, while he works on the organ in St. George’s Church. As they talk, Louiza spins mathematical formulas that convince her the pair share a destiny. They make love. Unknowingly impregnated, Louiza is promptly coerced and locked away by American Cold Warriors to tackle the math that will destroy communism. Malory, not realizing he’ll be a father, searches for her. Then Malory’s grandmother dies, bequeathing him a worn antique notebook. It’s a diary written by a friend of Isaac Newton during a year in Newton’s life lost to history. On the last page, in Newton’s hand, is written, "I have found the One True Rule...that guides the Universe." Levi’s narrative is linear, shifting from England to Rome to post–9/11 America, with flashbacks to Newton’s era, Charlemagne’s conquests, and Scheherazade’s tales. As Malory seeks Louiza and, through a strange series of events, becomes king of Septimania, the narrative moves to Rome, where Malory takes residence in Septimania’s plush villa enclosing its sanctum sanctorum, an overflowing antiquarian library. The reclusive Louiza and naif Malory earn sympathy, while supporting players like Antonella, a beautiful Italian girl at Cambridge, and La Principessa and Tibor, refugees from Communist Romania, fill Levi’s narrative with esoteric meditations, allusions, and metaphors on quantum behavior, the Grand Unified Theory, Bach, music, love and loss, the nature of numerology, and Schrödinger’s cat, all laced with philosophy and wit—"The digital alarm blinked out the minutes of the early hours with a spastic colon."
A thoroughly intellectual postmodern fable, wise yet melancholy, meant to be read slowly and savored.Pub Date: April 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4683-1248-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
