A chilling modern fairy tale of post-Communist Poland.
Mlek tells the story of a family haunted by an ominous raven in this debut novel translated from the Polish.
Hanka is troubled, both when she’s awake and when she’s asleep. During the day, she’s abused by her unstable mother, Sabina, who drinks and laments the passing of her youth and beauty. Hanka’s loving father, Janusz, does what he can to shield her from her mother’s fury, but he works long hours. At night, a demanding raven visits Hanka in her dreams and takes her flying with him, but he also forces her to find him food at the risk of her own well-being. When she disobeys the bird, he pecks at her head, drawing blood. Hanka’s waking-life situation deteriorates further when Sabina becomes pregnant and makes it clear she doesn’t want another child (or even the child she already has). She becomes increasingly abusive to Hanka, Janusz, and, later, the new baby, Bartek. She mellows a bit when she finds a new lover, a deliveryman with an apartment where she can escape from her family—that is, until the raven of Hanka’s dreams begins appearing in Sabina’s, expressing quixotic concerns over the baby’s health. When tragedy strikes, it becomes clear that the raven’s powers extend into the real world, and Hanka must decide whether she’s willing to play his game in order to keep herself safe. Mlek’s tale is caustic, bleak, and always seems to take the most disturbing route to remind readers that it’s no children’s fairy tale. The passages concerning the raven are wrought with a terrible, fabulist beauty, and readers will wish there were more of them, particularly in the novel’s first half. The daytime villain, Sabina, is just as fantastic in her own way. In this passage, she beats a relative bloody at the baptism party of little Bartek: “Blood leaked between his fingers as he shielded his face. Sabina threw back her head and laughed….Seeing that some of the guests were getting close, she fled, climbing up a willow and hiding amongst its branches.” In Mlek’s hands, night and day are equally nightmarish.
A chilling modern fairy tale of post-Communist Poland.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-927967-56-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Anyone who believes in true love or is simply willing to accept it as the premise of a winding tale will find this debut an...
True love flares between two people, but they find that circumstances always impede it.
On a winter day in London, Laurie spots Jack from her bus home and he sparks a feeling in her so deep that she spends the next year searching for him. Her roommate and best friend, Sarah, is the perfect wing-woman but ultimately—and unknowingly—ends the search by finding Jack and falling for him herself. Laurie’s hasty decision not to tell Sarah is the second painful missed opportunity (after not getting off the bus), but Sarah’s happiness is so important to Laurie that she dedicates ample energy into retraining her heart not to love Jack. Laurie is misguided, but her effort and loyalty spring from a true heart, and she considers her project mostly successful. Perhaps she would have total success, but the fact of the matter is that Jack feels the same deep connection to Laurie. His reasons for not acting on them are less admirable: He likes Sarah and she’s the total package; why would he give that up just because every time he and Laurie have enough time together (and just enough alcohol) they nearly fall into each other’s arms? Laurie finally begins to move on, creating a mostly satisfying life for herself, whereas Jack’s inability to be genuine tortures him and turns him into an ever bigger jerk. Patriarchy—it hurts men, too! There’s no question where the book is going, but the pacing is just right, the tone warm, and the characters sympathetic, even when making dumb decisions.
Anyone who believes in true love or is simply willing to accept it as the premise of a winding tale will find this debut an emotional, satisfying read.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-57468-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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