Despite some clunky political commentary, a gripping meditation on the nature of fear, silence, and survival.
In English for the first time, a 1970 French novel from prolific experimentalist Duras (The Lover, 1984, etc.)
In this brief novel the action is staged like an existentialist thriller, the prose reads like surreal noir, and the crime taking place is genocide. On a cold night in a town called Staadt (identified later as Prague), a Jewish man named Abahn is visited at home by a woman, Sabana, a stonemason, David, and another Jewish man also named Abahn. David has a gun, and Sabana tells the second Abahn that the first Abahn, whom she calls “the Jew,” will die at daybreak thanks to Gringo, the local leader of “the Party.” They spend the night deep in debate about their roles and motivations in the plot to kill Abahn the Jew. As dogs howl outside, the characters sometimes go deaf and blind, speaking while half-asleep about gas chambers, Soviet concentration camps, “the field of death,” and, awkwardly, “the sliding scale of the minimum wage.” Dialogue gets repeated back and forth as if the group is questioning each word’s meaning; their movements are logged meticulously, adding great tension to some scenes, absurdity to others, and translator Ali’s deft touch rendering this unreal environment's slippery fictive power is laudable. Duras positions the book’s moral center as a question of self-awareness, forcing Sabana and David to see how outside forces affect their smallest actions and thoughts: as the second Abahn says to Sabana, “I say if it’s David who pulls the trigger, it’s still Gringo who has killed him.” As gunfire erupts late in the book, David and Sabana must face the temptation to absolve themselves from blame by letting the faceless state take responsibility for their parts in the violence.
Despite some clunky political commentary, a gripping meditation on the nature of fear, silence, and survival.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-940953-36-6
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Open Letter
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
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
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