Dramatic material that has been better explored elsewhere, notably in Giorgio Bassani’s 1962 novel The Garden of the...
Levi’s English-language debut, 2001 winner of the Moravia Prize in Italy, uses a romance to dramatize the plight of Jews under Mussolini.
It’s love at first sight when Dino Carpi approaches the beautiful young woman lying on the ballroom floor in his parents’ hotel in Rome. She has broken her leg in a fall. Dino is a teacher, a classicist and an admirer of the Greek poet Pindar, who prized the harmony which Sonia exemplifies. This happened in 1930. It’s now 1967, and Dino, an old man in Tel Aviv, is writing his life story as a long letter to a recipient in Italy whose identity will remain unknown until the end. (It’s an awkward device.) The story hinges on the fact that Sonia is a Gentile and Dino is a Jew, though only the twice-a-year kind (Yom Kippur and Passover). She reciprocates his love, and the nonobservant Dino accedes to the demands of Sonia’s father, a wealthy banker and ardent fascist, that their marriage be Catholic and his Jewish roots stay hidden from their prospective children. Such a wimp does not make a stirring protagonist, and there’s no drama in Dino’s plodding account of his relationship with the equally passive Sonia. Their wedding and honeymoon barely rate a mention. Sonia’s family are reactionary bores, with the exception of rebellious kid sister Lorenza and witty, iconoclastic cousin Gherardo. They provide the only sparks of life until 1938, when Mussolini turns up the heat with his anti-Semitic proclamations. Dino is fired; his father sells the hotel. Pliant as ever, Dino goes along with Sonia’s plan (hatched by her father) for him to disavow paternity of his six-year-old son Michele; he even agrees to the annulment of his marriage. Only when militantly antifascist Lorenza dies in a suspicious “accident” does Dino express his outrage, but it’s too little, too late, and his solo flight to Palestine is anticlimactic.
Dramatic material that has been better explored elsewhere, notably in Giorgio Bassani’s 1962 novel The Garden of the Finzi-Continis.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-933372-93-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2009
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 masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.
An ambitious scientific experiment wreaks horrendous toll in the Booker-winning British author’s disturbingly eloquent sixth novel (after When We Were Orphans, 2000).
Ishiguro’s narrator, identified only as Kath(y) H., speaks to us as a 31-year-old social worker of sorts, who’s completing her tenure as a “carer,” prior to becoming herself one of the “donors” whom she visits at various “recovery centers.” The setting is “England, late 1990s”—more than two decades after Kath was raised at a rural private school (Hailsham) whose students, all children of unspecified parentage, were sheltered, encouraged to develop their intellectual and especially artistic capabilities, and groomed to become donors. Visions of Brave New World and 1984 arise as Kath recalls in gradually and increasingly harrowing detail her friendships with fellow students Ruth and Tommy (the latter a sweet, though distractible boy prone to irrational temper tantrums), their “graduation” from Hailsham and years of comparative independence at a remote halfway house (the Cottages), the painful outcome of Ruth’s breakup with Tommy (whom Kath also loves), and the discovery the adult Kath and Tommy make when (while seeking a “deferral” from carer or donor status) they seek out Hailsham’s chastened “guardians” and receive confirmation of the limits long since placed on them. With perfect pacing and infinite subtlety, Ishiguro reveals exactly as much as we need to know about how efforts to regulate the future through genetic engineering create, control, then emotionlessly destroy very real, very human lives—without ever showing us the faces of the culpable, who have “tried to convince themselves. . . . That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter.” That this stunningly brilliant fiction echoes Caryl Churchill’s superb play A Number and Margaret Atwood’s celebrated dystopian novels in no way diminishes its originality and power.
A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.Pub Date: April 11, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4339-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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