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
........ is a disquieting examination of a central, contemporary issue, and substitutes political conscience for the spiritual concern of Greene's recent vela but the battleground is still a highly personal terrain- and an individual is the chief casualty. Tom Fowler tells the story, in an attempt to exercise his guilt, and Fowler is an Englishman, a man of middle years, of few scruples, of even less courage, and disillusioned to the point of diffidence. It is in Salgon where he is stationed as a reporter that he meets Alden Pyle of the American Economic Mission, an innocent and an idealist, who belongs to ""a psychological world of great simplicity, where you talked of Democracy and Honor without the 'u'"". They have only one thing in common-Fowler's mandarin mistress Phuong whom Pyle is ready to marry. Fowler's first act of betrayal is toward Phuong- as he conceals from her the fact that his wife- in England- will not free him. His second is toward Pyle who has been engaged with a small time local General in an attempt to back a Third Force against the Communists, and when a bomb demonstration misfires, Fowler is equally responsible for the retaliation which leads to Pyle's death... A morality tale of these times- of impulsive idealism which is often ignorance on the one hand, up against the moral inertia of the rest of the world. Indochina, and the shabby, shoddy accent of the East sharpens the background for a novel which is an effective entertainment as well. It should assure a wider audience than Robert Shaplen's A Forest of Tigers (Knopf) which deals with this theme and this part of the world.
Pub Date: March 9, 1956
ISBN: 0143039024
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1956
Expect readers of this unpleasant hate poem to Budapest to cancel any plans they've made to travel there.
Budapest in 1995 is supposedly on the brink of post-communist economic revival, but the American expats who inhabit Keener’s second novel (Night Swim, 2013) can neither adjust to the city’s deep-seated complexity nor escape the problems they hoped to leave back home.
Annie and Will arrive with their adopted baby, Leo, so Will can pursue a startup creating “communication networks.” Unfortunately, Will, as seen through Annie’s eyes, is a research nerd with little aptitude for entrepreneurship. Annie hopes to escape what she considers intrusive involvement by the social worker who arranged Leo’s adoption. A one-time social worker herself (an irony Annie misses), she makes ham-handed attempts to help the locally hated Roma population. After eight months, Will has yet to close a deal when his former boss Bernardo, a glad-hander Annie doesn’t trust, shows up with an enticing offer. Bernardo hires Stephen, another expat, who has moved to Budapest to connect with his parents’ homeland; they fled Hungary for America after the 1956 uprising but never recovered emotionally. The story of his father’s suicide touches a chord in Annie, herself haunted by a tragic accident that destroyed her family’s happiness when she was 4. Meanwhile, 76-year-old Edward is in Budapest to track down his late daughter Deborah’s husband, Van. Edward believes Van murdered Deborah though the official cause of death was related to her multiple sclerosis. The only character besides Annie with a revealed inner life, Edward is embittered by his experience as a Jewish WWII soldier. He disapproved of Deborah’s hippie lifestyle and her attraction to men he considered losers, like Van. Over Will’s objections, and the readers’ disbelief, bleeding-heart Annie agrees to help Edward find Van. A bad idea. As for Budapest itself—polluted, in physical disrepair, plagued by an ugly history, and populated by rude, corrupt, and bigoted locals—the author strongly implies that the misery and mayhem Annie experiences are the city’s fault.
Expect readers of this unpleasant hate poem to Budapest to cancel any plans they've made to travel there.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61620-497-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
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