Inspired by a painting of the same title by Belgian artist Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921)—and the first in a series of such art-inspired fictions planned by Ecco—Oates's slim (112-page) new novella tells of an interracial love affair in early 20th-century rural New York—and its mysterious, tragic consequences. Edith Honeystone's mother died shortly after the girl's birth in 1890, but not before she nicknamed the red-haired infant "Calla"—a name the child clings to as she grows into a neglected, half-wild teen-ager with no discernible future. When George Freilicht, an unprepossessing farmer, foolishly finds the girl's smile intriguing, her relatives hastily marry her off. Bewildered, Calla moves about her unloved husband's property like a sleepwalker, taking refuge in solitary flights into the woods. Meanwhile, Calla manages to bear George two children (whom she generally ignores thereafter) before she encounters a kindred spirit in Tyrell Thompson, a black water, dowser. Her ensuing obsession with the itinerant worker causes a storm of gossip, virtually destroys the Freilicht family name, and breaks the spirit of Calla's husband. Still, the lovers stubbornly cling to one another until the townfolk have created an entire myth from the seeds of their passion: Edith is pregnant, people say; the black man is seven feet tall; Edith gave birth to a tainted baby and the family drowned it in the well. . . Such tales can end only in tragedy. Answering her lover's challenge, Calla accompanies him in a rowboat to the middle of the Chautauqua River, where the two drift toward dangerous Tintern Falls and their separate destinies while gazing steadily into each other's eyes. Such people "made gestures that lasted for life," reflects Calla's granddaughter, who narrates this account while marveling that that wild woman's blood courses through her own, apparently tamer, veins. Oates provides Khnopff's haunting work of art, to be featured on the cover, with an eloquent voice in this breathless, shadowy tale.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1990
ISBN: 0865381089
Page Count: 108
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1990
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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