A work of frequent beauty but puzzling intent.
An elderly woman’s diary of daily life in the Midwest provides inspiration for this assemblage of found text.
Scanlan’s debut begins with an indispensable author’s note in which she describes acquiring a diary at an estate auction. The diary spanned five years in the life of an Illinois woman who was 86 years old when she began the project of keeping track of her days. Falling apart and badly water-damaged, the diary was only partly legible. But the voice Scanlan found within it—idiosyncratic, matter-of-fact—compelled her to keep returning to the diary, rearranging and collaging bits of language. The result, labeled “part diary, part collage, part fiction,” is a slender volume arranged by seasons; most pages feature only a few words. The weather is one obsession: “Terrible windy,” reads one entry, “everything loose is traveling.” We get glimpses of chores, like sewing and canning, and gossip from others’ lives. A narrative starts to emerge when one recurring figure, seemingly a son or son-in-law, gets severely ill and then, in the hospital, “seemed to just sleep away.” There is an undeniable poignancy in the readerly act of filling in the gaps of this octogenarian's life, her voice pulled into the present from where it had been suspended in the late 1960s/early '70s. Scanlan’s project will be familiar to anyone who reads contemporary poetry: Titans like Susan Howe or Solmaz Sharif have made stunning poems from found text. But Scanlan’s book is “part fiction,” and it’s unclear where the invention, if any, actually comes in. What are the woman’s words, and what aren’t? Scanlan doesn’t explain. And where Sharif or Howe use public texts, this is private writing manipulated and published as a work of art by Scanlan. Here, the text offers pleasures that the context complicates.
A work of frequent beauty but puzzling intent.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-10687-4
Page Count: 128
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
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