Some Promised Land. The honey was there, but the milk we brought in with our goats. To people in California, God gives a magnificent coastline, a movie industry, and Beverly Hills. To us He gives:sand. To Cannes He gives a plush film festival. We get the PLO." Who's that talking, you ask? That's none other than the Old Testament's King David, who retells his long Biblical story on his deathbed—with a voice (and a viewpoint) that's part Mel Brooks, part Woody Allen, and all Joseph Heller. King David lies dying, terminally cold, unwarmed even by the lovely virgin Abishag the Shunammite. He still lusts after zaftig wife Bathsheba, who won't accommodate David's lust until he agrees to declare Solomon—a doltish plagiarist—as successor to the crown of Israel. So the miserable old king remembers the whole shmear: from crazy Saul and stupid Goliath to poor, snake-ish Absalom. And Heller has a generous grab-bag of ironic, earthy ideas here: David the psalmist, the career-poet, jealous when his best material is stolen by Solomon; David the Jewish husband, with first-wife Michal as the original J.A.P.; David the aging scion and general. Throughout, in fact, the Biblical original is worked through closely, with impressive stamina and elaboration—and, as a short story or novella, perhaps, the notion would have been pure champagne. . . even if clearly pressed from the grapes of Brooks' 2000-Year-Old-Man routines. Here, however, as in George MacDonald Fraser's swashbuckling parody, The Pyrates (p. 586), the basic gimmicks—the blithely outrageous anachronisms, the double-takes, the raunchy Yiddish/English slang, the varied lampoons on King James Bible phraseology—become dutiful and predictable at big-novel length. Meanwhile, Heller's more interesting character/history/theology inventions (e.g., the David/Bathsheba relationship) remain undeveloped, with the Borscht Belt rhythms too relentless to allow for depth or nuance. And the entire vaudeville enterprise eventually seems wilted, formula-creased. Still, what Heller manages to do with faithful attention to the scriptures of Samuel I and II and Kings is often remarkable. ("The first time I laid eyes on Abigail—I was girded for battle and thirsting for vengeance as I marched along the road to Carmel—my member grew hard as hickory and I sheepishly and modestly veiled it from notice with a folded newspaper.") It's also often shtick-ishly hilarious: "'You said pisseth, didn't you?' 'Pisseth?' "That'th right. You thaid all who pisseth against the wall.' 'I timid pisseth?' I was furious now and answered him with a heat that equaled his own. 'I thaid no thuch thing.' 'Yeth, you did. Athk anyone.'" So, though sometimes only half-amusing and never really persuasive as a serious theological farce (David is waiting for an apology from God), Heller's Biblical free-for-all is sure to win a substantial, curious, browsing-and-sampling audience.
Pub Date: Oct. 8, 1984
ISBN: 0684841258
Page Count: 373
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1984
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.
An ambitious scientific experiment wreaks horrendous toll in the Booker-winning British author’s disturbingly eloquent sixth novel (after When We Were Orphans, 2000).
Ishiguro’s narrator, identified only as Kath(y) H., speaks to us as a 31-year-old social worker of sorts, who’s completing her tenure as a “carer,” prior to becoming herself one of the “donors” whom she visits at various “recovery centers.” The setting is “England, late 1990s”—more than two decades after Kath was raised at a rural private school (Hailsham) whose students, all children of unspecified parentage, were sheltered, encouraged to develop their intellectual and especially artistic capabilities, and groomed to become donors. Visions of Brave New World and 1984 arise as Kath recalls in gradually and increasingly harrowing detail her friendships with fellow students Ruth and Tommy (the latter a sweet, though distractible boy prone to irrational temper tantrums), their “graduation” from Hailsham and years of comparative independence at a remote halfway house (the Cottages), the painful outcome of Ruth’s breakup with Tommy (whom Kath also loves), and the discovery the adult Kath and Tommy make when (while seeking a “deferral” from carer or donor status) they seek out Hailsham’s chastened “guardians” and receive confirmation of the limits long since placed on them. With perfect pacing and infinite subtlety, Ishiguro reveals exactly as much as we need to know about how efforts to regulate the future through genetic engineering create, control, then emotionlessly destroy very real, very human lives—without ever showing us the faces of the culpable, who have “tried to convince themselves. . . . That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter.” That this stunningly brilliant fiction echoes Caryl Churchill’s superb play A Number and Margaret Atwood’s celebrated dystopian novels in no way diminishes its originality and power.
A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.Pub Date: April 11, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4339-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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PERSPECTIVES
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