A fine companion to Möring’s longer novels, and probably his most accomplished yet.
A family borne aloft, then gradually destroyed by the experience (and the enigma) of flight is portrayed with compassionate insight in this terse, if intermittently obscure, novella by the Dutch author of The Great Longing (1995) and In Babylon (2000).
We first meet its unnamed narrator when he’s a 12-year-old boy growing up in the 1960s in the Netherlands, living with “a father who wasn’t very interested in the world and a slightly absent mother.” The latter, Julia, is a former mayor’s daughter who had quit her nursing job to care for the latter, Philip Ziegler, a WWII bomber pilot who had left his family behind while spending the war years in England, then been injured after the armistice, while working as a crop sprayer. These details and others emerge from several scenes that describe (in impressive specific detail) the family’s attempt to make ends meet by building model airplanes for their “doll doctor” (i.e., toyshop proprietor) landlord. As Philip’s depression and inertia deepen, and Julia grows more remote and emotionally eccentric, the narrator is tutored, in effect, by Philip’s former military comrade Humbert Coe, an ebullient gourmand and sophisticate who encourages the boy’s (rather odd) passion for cookery. The major concerns here don’t seem to fit together until a rain-soaked night during which relationships are bluntly clarified, and a brief epilogue set nearly 30 years later, when the narrator, himself now a “doll doctor,” tells a group of children a pointed “fairy tale” about a sculptor whose imperious king demands a stature of the world’s most beautiful woman. Möring’s compact fable of innocence beguiled, betrayed, and eventually matured into sobered acceptance has something of the abrupt elliptical tensile strength of fiction like Ford’s The Good Soldier and L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between, and its dense metaphoric weave makes it close kin as well to Michel Tournier’s subtle symbolic fictions.
A fine companion to Möring’s longer novels, and probably his most accomplished yet.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-621240-5
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
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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