It's been said that memory is a poet—if so, this novel represents some of its most gorgeous and incandescent work.
The son of one of Argentina’s thousands of dissidents who vanished and were presumed murdered during the so-called Dirty War uses his fertile memory to bring his lost mother back to life.
The “disappeared”—those deemed left-wing enemies of the vicious military dictatorship that ruled Argentina during the 1970s and early '80s—still haunt the country’s collective memory, especially the surviving family members who don’t know what happened to their absent loved ones. This first novel by López, a poet, actor, and director of the literary group Ciclo Carne Argentina, paints an intensely evocative portrait of one such missing person: a woman whose name is one of the few things her son doesn’t disclose about her from the memories he carries from childhood. As the book’s title implies, it is her physical magnetism that the son most wishes to convey from the beginning: “Her skin was pale and opaque; I could almost say it was bluish, and it had a luster that made it unique, of a natural aristocracy, removed from trivialities.” She was, clearly, a single mother, though it isn’t altogether clear how or why she became single. The son, who likewise isn’t named, doesn’t know much about who and where his father is (though in a dream, he thinks he sees his red hair passing by one Christmas Eve). Otherwise it’s just him and his “beautiful young” mother who do everything together—except at those times when she leaves him with their neighbor and heads off “with a worried expression on her face” for whole evenings. Where she goes and what she does isn’t specified, because the little boy knows nothing except the pleasure he gets whenever they go to the movies or when she allows him to have some candy (which she otherwise forbids) after a bomb scare interrupts his school play. The sweet details of the intimate times between mother and son are delicately woven with shadows of impending menace that, as they're viewed from a child’s perspective, are at best vaguely defined beyond his mother’s odd silences and occasional tearful outbursts. Still, both he and we are kept in the dark as to the nature of her unease, and even the day when the boy’s life changes forever reveals little except physical and emotional ruin. The process of recovering from that ruin, one suspects, culminates with this heartbreaking and moving reverie.
It's been said that memory is a poet—if so, this novel represents some of its most gorgeous and incandescent work.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61219-681-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
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 deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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