A bit intellectual and rarefied, much like Rudolf’s work is reputed to be.
Well, a comedy of sorts—but more a tragicomedy of distrust and good intentions gone woefully wrong.
Rudolf, the main character, does not even appear in the novel, for he has recently committed suicide in Turin, where he had been a prominent professor at the university. His best friend, the narrator, is appointed literary executor. Rudolf had been an intellectual and a writer, and his truculent and unmannerly personality emerges as the narrator comes into contact with three women in Rudolf’s life. His wife Elsa, now lying in a coma as she dies of cancer, was a formidable intellectual in her own right (though Rudolf confessed that he found her stuff “unreadable”). We also meet Eva, something of a mystery woman, whose large cache of letters the narrator discovers among the 64 cartons of voluminous papers Rudolf left behind. Finally, there’s the cold and intimidating Marta, Rudolf’s colleague at the University of Turin and (perhaps) his lover. The narrator is charged with sorting through and making sense of Rudolf’s personal and literary legacy. What is particularly urgent is the need to discover whether Rudolf’s reputed last work, The Testament, a book that was supposed to revolutionize the novel as a mode of writing, was merely a figment of his febrile imagination. Amidst the sorting process the narrator uncovers sordid information he feels might besmirch the reputation of the redoubtable Rudolf, papers he wants either to suppress or destroy. Along the way he encounters contradictions—Rudolf’s hidden rooftop menagerie, for example, where Rudolf was able to indulge his lavish love of animals, stands in contradiction to his prickly relationships with human beings. By the time the narrator gets to the 64th carton, he discovers that he has unwittingly destroyed papers that would have upheld Rudolf’s formidable artistic reputation.
A bit intellectual and rarefied, much like Rudolf’s work is reputed to be.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-15-101268-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2007
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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