A brisk and sophisticated study of a conscience in crisis.
A Colombian political cartoonist has second thoughts about a takedown he delivered decades earlier.
As Vásquez’s spare but powerful novel opens, Javier is comfortably settled into a long career as an acclaimed satirist: luminaries pack a theater for an event celebrating his life, culminating with the announcement of a postage stamp bearing his likeness. (Even his estranged wife is in attendance.) The good feelings are wrecked the next day, however, with the arrival in his remote home of Samanta, who wants to discuss some history. Twenty-eight years earlier she was a friend of Javier’s daughter, Beatriz, and one evening the pair of 7-year-olds accidentally got drunk on the dregs of the glasses at a party. The next day Javier, projecting his anxieties, drew a cartoon suggesting a congressman who attended the party was a pedophile, though he wasn’t near the girls. From there, Vásquez (The Sound of Things Falling, 2014, etc.) contemplates the fickle nature of reputations and how callowness and selfishness can engineer their destruction. “Life turns us into caricatures of ourselves,” Javier bemusedly observes during the celebration of his career, but as the story progresses it’s clear he’s spent little time thinking that he himself might be affected by a lifetime of exaggerating flaws and mocking foibles—and ignoring his own anger and neglectfulness. Samanta and Javier’s investigation of the fate of the ruined congressman and his family troubles those around him: “The last thing you want to do is start asking questions,” his editor tells him, a peculiar utterance from a newspaperman. Though the scope is less broad than Vásquez’s other novels, it has plenty of philosophical bite, and he’s savvy about our private urges to preen and elevate ourselves.
A brisk and sophisticated study of a conscience in crisis.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59463-347-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
PROFILES
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.
