A bit of a potboiler, but Sarvas transcends that label with skillful prose and well-drawn characters.
When Matt Santos, a veteran Hollywood character actor, gets a call about a painting allegedly looted from his family by Nazis in 1944 Budapest, his life is thrown into personal, professional, and spiritual turmoil.
The allure of the painting, by a tortured interwar artist named Ervin Kálmán, has at the beginning little to do with art (Matt is no connoisseur) or money (he's already well-off) or even adventure (he has a steady stream of parts to occupy him and an impending marriage to a model, too). What inflames his interest is a mystery: why does his father, always a remorseless opportunist, want nothing to do with the return of the now very valuable painting? The elder Santos (the name has been anglicized, or hispanicized, from Szantos) lost his mother and many relatives to the Holocaust, moved to the U.S. a decade later, and became, for his only son, an intimidating cipher: gruff, laconic, a little cruel, a man most comfortable with the toy cars he collects and fusses over and sells. Matt knows his own view may be jaundiced, and the book's strength is his constant, agonized, questing revision of his sense of who the old man is and what the implications are for his own identity. The wrangle over the painting quickly plunges him into deep waters. Soon his romance is foundering thanks to an intense attraction to his devout and lovely lawyer; his professional life is imploding; and he's plunged into spiritual confusion as, for the first time, he begins to explore, and to embrace, the Judaism that his father abandoned. There are elements here that feel overdetermined (the godly and dying rabbi who vies with him for the painting, for example) or born of box-office considerations (the Hollywood and modeling milieu), but overall, Sarvas (Harry Revised, 2008) delivers a lively, thoughtful, psychologically compelling novel about the ties that bind, and the ties that fail to.
A bit of a potboiler, but Sarvas transcends that label with skillful prose and well-drawn characters.Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-20637-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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