Not for the faint of heart.
Dutch novelist Möring (The Dream Room, 2002, etc.) pulls out all the stops in this rich, complex, obscure and polyphonic narrative of a descent into the soul.
The pilgrim is Jacob Noah, who hid for the last three years of World War II. When he emerges, he finds his parents and brother gone and little meaning in his life. He returns to his father’s shoemaking shop in the village of Assen in the Netherlands, marries a farmer’s daughter and starts a family, but he remains haunted by his past and his inability to escape his Jewish identity. He succeeds beyond his expectations in becoming rich, yet feels empty and unfulfilled. After a car accident almost takes Jacob’s life, he finds himself in the strange hands of a peddler called “The Jew of Assen,” an embodiment of death who becomes a Virgil of sorts. (The book echoes Dante’s Inferno, Homer, Greek mythology, Miles Davis and more.) When the peddler takes Jacob into his past and into his soul, it becomes clear that the shoemaker is no shrinking violet. When revisiting a particularly egregious act of anti-Semitism, Jacob puts his guide on the defensive by exclaiming, “So? Where were you? Were you a ghost in the shadows? Were you one of the people who stood laughing and watching along the side of the road?... Where were you?” At the end of the novel Jacob moves toward feeling at home in the here and now: In a cemetery called Beth Olam, Hebrew for “the house of eternity,” he remembers that olam also means world and thinks, “House of the world…he liked the sound of it.” Möring loves to experiment wildly with form, transforming parts of his narrative into cartoons, embracing digressions in enormous parentheses and using graphics to depict fireworks onomatopoetically.
Not for the faint of heart.Pub Date: March 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-621241-8
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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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