Almost certainly the oddest love story you’ll have read in a long time. Think of Murakami drifting into the lands of Borges...
“All trees are incarnations of frustrated love.” So avers this beguiling novel by the writer whom J.M. Clezio has called Korea’s most likely Nobel Prize contender.
Ki-hyeon is a lascivious and shallow young man. As Lee’s story opens, with a somewhat fusty term, he is negotiating with a “lady of the night,” one of his conditions being that she remove her makeup. He approves of her “voluptuous breasts,” and then again of her “voluptuous body and gigantic breasts,” and then—well, it doesn’t matter, because he is not procuring the hooker for himself but instead for his brother Woo-hyeon, having taken over that duty from his mother. Say what? Yes, said brother has lost both legs in a military accident and, with them, much of his will to live, though when a bright young singer named Soon-mee enters the picture, the brother, glad to be done with sex for hire, perks up. Soon enough, he and Soon-mee are addressing each other in gigglingly mythical terms, he calling her his “nymph” and she calling him her “beast.” Ki-hyeon falls in love with Soon-mee himself, though there’s a tangle with a brutal brother-in-law to sort out. If you’re confused, only a bit into the book, there are more conundrums to come. Some are served up by a taciturn father who doesn’t have much to say about human affairs but insists that plants are more worthy of love than most people—which may explain why Woo-hyeon winds up, in a dreamlike conclusion, borrowing a page from the Greek myth of Apollo and Daphne, “pray[ing] to be transformed into a tree.” But who is Apollo in the tale? Try to diagram the plot, and you might give yourself whiplash; at the very least, you’re likely to feel a little unmoored as the real world, such as it is, slips away into myth and dream.
Almost certainly the oddest love story you’ll have read in a long time. Think of Murakami drifting into the lands of Borges and Kafka, and you’ll have some of the feel of this strange, enchanting tale.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62897-116-3
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
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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