Too short to feel like a full-bodied novel but an admirable literary lagniappe.
A young man makes a demanding but soul-stirring trek through the kitchens of France’s finer restaurants.
De Kerangal’s previous novel published in English, The Heart (2016), was a straightforward tale of organ donation from the donor’s death to transplant surgery. The trajectory of this novel is a similar forward march, but it encompasses more emotional and sensory detail; it’s slim but potent. The story follows Mauro and his love of cooking from childhood (baking cakes in elementary school) and young adulthood (weaning his friends off fast food with homemade meals) to pursuing a culinary career in his native France. Every tale of culinary apprenticeship seems to demand a trial by fire in a perfectionist kitchen, and this one is no different: He’s chided, whacked in the head with a melon baller, and works endless hours. His social life vaporizes; his girlfriend leaves him. But the author does a fine job of exploring why someone like Mauro is still enchanted by the lifestyle. A love of food is part of it, and she writes lovingly about “the taste of a tomato, the subtlety of a stalk of asparagus, the crunch of a curly endive.” She’s less interested in food porn, though, than in the way the kitchen provides a kind of holistic calm: “He can cook by ear as well as with his nose, hands, mouth, and eyes.” What Mauro’s life lacks is time to rest, and the anonymous narrator, vaguely suggested as a potential love interest, frames his life as bittersweet, shaped by success in the culinary world but resisting the compromises his increasing success demands, his “mental life simmering carefully like milk over a fire.” A life like Mauro’s is forever uncertain, the story suggests, but sweetened by an endless cookbook’s worth of options.
Too short to feel like a full-bodied novel but an admirable literary lagniappe.Pub Date: March 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-12090-0
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
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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