An unusual first novel, about the fate of the Polish Jews during WW II, that engagingly blends doctrinal wisdom with magical- realist surrealism. The protagonist and narrator, 60-year-old Chaim Skibelski (identified as the author's great-grandfather) is, as his remarkable story begins, dead—shot by German soldiers and dumped into a mass grave along with dozens of his kinsmen and townspeople. Yet Chaim's torn and still-bleeding body remains above ground, invisible to others, paradoxically capable of thinking and feeling, getting drunk, committing poltergeist-like mischief, and conversing with wolves, among other newfound abilities. On his continually interrupted pilgrimage toward ``the World to Come,'' Chaim is accompanied (then, unaccountably, deserted) by his village rabbi, whose shape has shifted into that of a talking crow; reunites with his two wives, several children, and various old friends; debates (in the most awkward and over-attenuated sequence here) man's obligation to his fellow man with the decapitated head of a German soldier; and crosses a river to arrive at the luxurious Hotel Amfortas—which appears to be a beneficent purgatory, until Chaim discovers what is actually being baked in the hotel's underground ovens. Finally, he joins a group of scholars who have hidden out during the war and are employing mathematics, astrophysics, and the precepts of the Kabbalah in an effort to restore to its empty place in the sky the disappeared, ``landlocked'' moon. Their labor is accomplished, and in a lovely visionary conclusion, Chaim's abused and weary body is laid to rest. This is, on balance, a haunting novel, intensely imagined, and—if less successfully plotted and placed—redeemed by Skibell's gifts for vivid imagery (sleeping ``bodies lie twisted, like shipwrecks, in the sheets, as though a great sea had tossed them there'') and robust gallows humor (``If there is a Paradise, do you actually think they'd let Jews into it?''). A fine debut, manifestly infused with deep familial and cultural feeling, and a significant contribution to the ongoing literature of the Holocaust.
Pub Date: Oct. 3, 1997
ISBN: 1-56512-179-1
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1997
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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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