Intelligent and amusing: a tour de force for the literate tabloid enthusiast.
Eleven stories in a third collection from Bukiet (While the Messiah Tarries, 1995, etc.) focus on the complicated lives of the renowned and disingenuous.
In the opener, “Squeak, Memory,” a writer stalks Nabokov in New York during the Watergate season. A Humbert Humbert’s Quilty-figure to Vladimir, the unnamed narrator delights in extracting hidden meanings from every mundane gesture of the great writer and lepidopterist. In “Splinter,” a seriously funny rumination on collectible relics, a science-fiction hack turned media-mogul bids for the centerpiece completing his reconstruction of the True Cross, only to be upstaged by a mysterious woman in green. “The Return of Eros to Academe” will provoke the ire of campaigners who thought Mamet’s Oleanna tackled the seductive student/teacher relationship genre unrealistically. “Paper Hero” trails a literary wannabe (Bukiet’s doppelgänger) who’s convinced that in order to publish his book and usurp Rushdie on the Islamic most wanted list, he needs to be shot. “The Suburbiad” is a mythopeic bore. But, fortunately, “The Swap” picks up the slack with a Borgesian tale of a Nobel laureate and his Faustian deal with a cab driver. Next comes “Filophilia,” as a homicidal mother’s soliloquy before a judge shows the extent to which a mother can love her son. “But, Microsoft! What Byte Through Yonder Windows Breaks?” is, well, slightly overcooked. “Tongue of the Jews” toys with a delicate matter. Gentile Ned, obsessed with Judaism and the Holocaust, confronts his idol, Keeper, a writer and survivor who has been sleeping with Ned’s wife and publishing the details. Keeper decides to help Ned convert, symbolically, using a sharp letter opener. In “The Two Franzes,” a young Kafka roams the streets of Prague delivering absurd correspondences between a playwright and an aristocrat, while “The War Lovers” chronicles a perverse homicide/genocide photographer whose end comes at the hands and teeth of mechanical bunnies.
Intelligent and amusing: a tour de force for the literate tabloid enthusiast.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-393-05816-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
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
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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