A most unusual debut collection, and a very good one indeed.
Envy, snobbery and xenophobia coexist with such literal crimes as child abuse and drug-peddling.
In each of the 12 tales here, a settled life is either gradually or abruptly disturbed. When the Winter family depart (in “Stone”) from its guided tour of China and Hong Kong to “travel independently,” they find themselves abetting the very human-rights violations they righteously deplore. In “Powder,” London solicitor Peter Pelham accidentally takes possession of a stash of cocaine, wonders how it might improve his dull, respectable life—and finds paradoxical fulfillment in risking his family’s security. British author Kneale (Mr. Foreigner, 2003, etc.) roams widely abroad in brisk, incisive portrayals of an overweight, twice-divorced geologist traveling China’s Silk Road and encountering an Asian Muslim beauty who seems to love him for himself (“Weight”); an unproductive writer whose submissive affair with a wealthy older woman is redefined when they purchase a rundown Italian villa (“Sunlight”); and a young Palestinian suicide bomber’s sorrowful resignation to the fate his culture requires of him (“White”). A few stories misfire: an anecdotal account of a Colombian family’s revenge against a heartless coca dealer (“Leaves”), for instance, and a tale of a pampered noblewoman given a lesson in living by the maid she suspects of stealing from her (“Taste”). Both lack the sense of narrative completeness Kneale builds into such successes as the story of an Englishman caught up in a protest demonstration in North Africa, whence he has come to pursue an agenda chillingly foreshadowed in the best of all these pieces’ single-word titles: “Metal.” Even better are brilliantly wrought accounts of a young music journalist’s confrontation with his unknown “stalker” (“Sound”) and the undoing (in “Numbers”) of a computer analyst’s ordered domestic life by the specter of a death in his extended family.
A most unusual debut collection, and a very good one indeed.Pub Date: March 15, 2005
ISBN: 0-385-51407-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
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
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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