An ingenious conjoining of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Kipling’s animal tales and Galician folklore, all in an effervescent...
The worlds of humans and animals, of past and present, blend amusingly together in this magical 1994 novel from the Spanish author (The Carpenter’s Pencil, 2001).
In the village of Aran, in Galicia, a young girl (Rosa) notices a fresco that has suddenly appeared on a church wall, depicting gorgeously arrayed females whom she presumes to be saints. Aran’s priest, Don Xil, however, assures his parishioners that the figures are embodiments of the Seven Deadly Sins. This accusation was perhaps unwise, for Don Xil dies—and is reincarnated as a mouse, partial to dining on the contents of a local manor’s vast library, including miscellaneous periodicals. As years pass, Rosa grows up and marries, bears her brutal husband Cholo three children, befriends the wealthy old woman (Misia) who returns to the manor house (where she’d grown up) to die, and takes a lover: “Spiderman,” recently returned from working on a construction gang in New York City. These events, as well as the quixotic-romantic adventures of Rosa’s slow-witted brother Simon (who’s mute, except when conversing with animals), are observed and discussed by the “transmigrated” Don Xil and other similarly altered souls, such as the 300 crows (former poets in the service of medieval Galician monarchs) that fly above Aran; a onetime “producer of crime” for films and television who’s now a lizard; an anarchist who’s become (to Don Xil’s alarm) a cat, and a lady fortuneteller who is now a mole (and hence, of course, blind). Misia’s tales of her vanished flamboyant youth also become part of a roiling narrative that reaches a wonderful climax after Spiderman restores to health a wounded fox caught in a trap, enabling Rosa to achieve her long-desired liberation.
An ingenious conjoining of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Kipling’s animal tales and Galician folklore, all in an effervescent fiction that vibrates with wit, energy and charm.Pub Date: July 14, 2005
ISBN: 1-58567-467-2
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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