A nimble writer who merits wider readership in English—and several more novels await translation.
A postmodern work of fiction made up of neatly assembled and interpreted facts, the first of Argentine writer Sagasti's books to be translated into English.
It makes good sense that by day, Sagasti works as a museum curator, for this is a diligently collected series of oddments that help make sense of how the world works—and, as Sagasti writes, that it works at all is a marvel, since “for the machine to keep running, it’s better not to mention certain things.” Those certain things might include matters of family dysfunction or historical inconveniences; whatever the case, Sagasti enjoys turning them up and looking them over, counseling that in a world full of people as cold as the distant heavens, “we should seek out only the fireflies,” never mind that they die just like everything else. Sagasti keeps the theme of his title alive and at work throughout this brief book, which turns into a lively meditation on how things connect and cohere of the sort that Guy Davenport would have approved. One firefly is the German artist Joseph Beuys, shot down as a Luftwaffe pilot over Russia and briefly held by a Tatar shaman who allays his fears by pointing to the flickering stars—and then, it seems, implants those stars in Beuys’ head, for “shamans travel into the skies in search of the sick person’s soul in order to return it to their body.” If shamans can do it, so can the time-traveling Billy Pilgrim, another prisoner of war, of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five; and the Tatars may have taken an idea or two from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, another flyer whose novel The Little Prince was translated into their language. In the manner of a well-functioning ecosystem, everything in Sagasti’s book connects to everything else, and it’s a subtle marvel—especially the surprise ending.
A nimble writer who merits wider readership in English—and several more novels await translation.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9997227-4-6
Page Count: 85
Publisher: Charco Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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