A mix-and-match novel with the grunge of Bukowski, the teeth-grinding momentum of the Beats and the acidic self-loathing of...
The ugly saga of the relationship between a self-professed outlaw and a psychotic crack whore.
This drug-fueled, Beat-influenced slab of a novel arrives with a bizarre pedigree. Tattoo artist–turned-novelist Shaw (Love Songs to the Dead, 2009, etc.) is the son of jazz great Artie Shaw and the contemporary of kindred spirits ranging from Iggy Pop to Lydia Lunch, who contributes an introduction. Here, his 2007 debut novel (originally published by indie Heartworm Press) has been shepherded to republication by Johnny Depp. Unfortunately, this novel about an obsessed bandito and the raging lunatic he falls for is trying so hard to mimic other writers’ styles that it ultimately doesn’t find much to say that is new or different from its influences. Our narrator is Ignacio Valencia Lobos, known on the streets of Rio de Janeiro as “Cigano,” or gypsy. After years running heroin between Mexico and California, Cigano has kicked his habit in prison and come home. “Wide awake now. Picking up the shattered pieces of a faded, fuzzy little jigsaw puzzle nightmare called Home,” he says. His life is pretty much destroyed when he meets Narcisa, a glue-huffing, babbling poet/prostitute with a psyche shattered by childhood sexual abuse, a zealous addiction to drugs and a broken patois that doesn’t always sound authentic. That’s pretty much it for the next several hundred pages—the damaged duo have violent, incensed sex, they fight, she leaves, she comes back, and then the cycle starts all over again. He gets a little insight into her condition from “Doc,” a kind of odd paternal figure to Narcisa. But the cycle is always the same old same old when Cigano turns back up on Narcisa’s doorstep. “So what if my love was for a psychotic, violent, abusive, foul-mouthed, unsanitary crack whore with a hell-bent rage and an insatiable appetite for destruction?” Ain’t love grand?
A mix-and-match novel with the grunge of Bukowski, the teeth-grinding momentum of the Beats and the acidic self-loathing of addiction novels.Pub Date: March 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-235499-0
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
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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