Riley (In Pursuit of the Green Lion, 1990) continues, in her congenially gossipy fashion, to elbow a bright, appealing heroine through some of history's more unlovely byways—here, a scramble of 17th-century French aristocrats, some of whom (including a royal mistress or two) patronized a flourishing consortium of fortunetellers, poisoners, abortionists, and stagers of black masses. Within this dangerous milieu, a young girl finds notoriety, wealth, love...and an exit. ``This wicked world of ours needs its witches,'' says ``La Voisin'' (like several other characters, a real personage), czarina of a network of occult practitioners, who at one point ``held the entire kingdom of France in her hands.'' It was La Voisin, recognizing promising material in the grieving, crippled, raging 16-year-old daughter of a noble house of cruelty (and, as it turned out, murder), who snatched Genevieve Pasquier from suicide and groomed her for a fortunetelling career. So the ``Marquise de Morville,'' 150 years old, dressed in antique style with white face-paint, is created and is a smashing success. She'll read for the stupid queen as well as for King Louis XIV and his reigning mistress, both sleekly ferocious as adders. Genevieve is under contract to La Voisin, who rules the curious domesticity of her rue Beauregard house, home of mysterious cabinets, little bottles, a lovely garden with a smoking chimney, and a busy kitchen where cheerful women boil down...well, never mind. In the meantime, the ``Marquise'' dotes on one man and finds another, learns of murders close to home, and, with police closing in and the house at rue Beauregard about to fall, achieves a very narrow escape. Not quite as murkily scary as Anne Rice's grue-fests, but chilly, witty, and completely engrossing. With a cheerful skewering (historically grounded) of the sheer, cretinous awfulness of the Sun King's satellites, plenty of skittery action, and a wisp of the supernatural (the heroine does ``see'' the future). Great good fun. (Book-of-the-Month Club selection)
Pub Date: June 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-670-85054-3
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1994
Come to think of it, this feels more like a factory product than a book as such—competent enough, and resembling a book in...
A high-toned neogothic yarn by veteran author Steel (Legacy, 2010, etc.), who owns the genre.
You’ve got to pity one-percenter, almost-septuagenerian Olivia Grayson, who runs a fashion and lifestyle-accessory empire called The Factory—“an empire that had reached around the world, and an industry that no one could compete with, although many tried.” She’s quite staggeringly rich, and so are her children, whom she’s co-opted into various positions involving finance and art, son Phillip the former, son John the latter, for Phillip had ”his father’s steady head for finance,” while “John had inherited Olivia’s innate artistic sense for design.” (A philosophical question: Can something innate be inherited?) But what of the daughters? One is a clinger, afraid of her own shadow, the other resolutely independent and wanting nothing to do with Mom and all her mounds of cash. So what happens when Mom finally hits 70, the family is assembled, various spouses get in on the act and the secrets begin to spill out? Ah, there’s the Steel magic, all regret, gnashing of teeth and tears shed into very expensive glasses of champagne; it ain’t King Lear, but it’s fraught with the dynamite of family dynamics anyway. Can the children pull themselves together enough to keep things going for their children? Can the Empress Olivia keep the empire going? Will The Factory keep on manufacturing things that no one needs but everyone wants?
Come to think of it, this feels more like a factory product than a book as such—competent enough, and resembling a book in form, but with a certain emptiness at its heart. Still, if you care about the tribulations of the very rich, this is your book.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-385-34320-6
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2012
More faithful to the original but less astonishing than Christopher Logue’s work and lacking some of the music of Fagles’...
Fresh version of one of the world’s oldest epic poems, a foundational text of Western literature.
Sing to me, O muse, of the—well, in the very opening line, the phrase Wilson (Classical Studies, Univ. of Pennsylvania) chooses is the rather bland “complicated man,” the adjective missing out on the deviousness implied in the Greek polytropos, which Robert Fagles translated as “of twists and turns.” Wilson has a few favorite words that the Greek doesn’t strictly support, one of them being “monstrous,” meaning something particularly heinous, and to have Telemachus “showing initiative” seems a little report-card–ish and entirely modern. Still, rose-fingered Dawn is there in all her glory, casting her brilliant light over the wine-dark sea, and Wilson has a lively understanding of the essential violence that underlies the complicated Odysseus’ great ruse to slaughter the suitors who for 10 years have been eating him out of palace and home and pitching woo to the lovely, blameless Penelope; son Telemachus shows that initiative, indeed, by stringing up a bevy of servant girls, “their heads all in a row / …strung up with the noose around their necks / to make their death an agony.” In an interesting aside in her admirably comprehensive introduction, which extends nearly 80 pages, Wilson observes that the hanging “allows young Telemachus to avoid being too close to these girls’ abused, sexualized bodies,” and while her reading sometimes tends to be overly psychologized, she also notes that the violence of Odysseus, by which those suitors “fell like flies,” mirrors that of some of the other ungracious hosts he encountered along his long voyage home to Ithaca.
More faithful to the original but less astonishing than Christopher Logue’s work and lacking some of the music of Fagles’ recent translations of Homer; still, a readable and worthy effort.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-08905-9
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
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