Tillman is as piquant and provocative as ever.
A self-involved, intentionally run-on and cleverly compelling novel about nothing and everything by the versatile experimentalist Tillman (This Is Not It, 2002, etc.).
The narrator of this curious work, both tedious and engaging, has taken up living in a kind of New England retreat or institution (she notes that she arrived “in a voluntary manner, but wearily, as I had little hope”), where she inhabits her own room, shares pleasant living spaces, and takes her meals in a dining hall. She offers many facts about her life, and a bit of childhood history, e.g., her mother is old and brain-damaged; her now-deceased father was once in the textile business (hence her preoccupation with fabrics); and her older brother has “disappeared” from her life. She also cherishes her pets and tends to keep her distance from the other residents—grumpy, eccentric types she renames according to her mood, such as Contesa, a brown-skinned social worker obsessed with Franz Kafka, and the so-called demanding man whose complaints are interminable. Time is “shapeless” at the institution, delineated by mealtimes, and the narrator spends it reading and observing and attending lectures. Aside from long, engrossing digressions on the development of fabrics, the history of the chair, the incarcerated Charles Manson groupie Leslie Van Houten and many other subjects, the narrator maintains one insistent train of thought, involving her sanguine Polish beautician. Indeed, the narrator is fascinated by skin, namely her “sensitive skin,” which is too thin to shield her from the harshness of the greater world. Skin ailments offer clues to mortality, and the narrator becomes a keen “reader of skin.” A séance directed by a resident she calls the Magician closes her sojourn; and feeling at the “end of her rope,” she returns to her home and retrieves her cat from her mother’s care. Has she been transformed? Probably not, but it’s a circuitous, riveting journey.
Tillman is as piquant and provocative as ever.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2006
ISBN: 1-933368-44-6
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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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