A welcome rediscovery and a book that would make Gogol guffaw.
A forgotten classic of early Soviet literature—forgotten for reasons political and not literary.
Zoshchenko was a “fellow traveler” of Lenin and company, but, as Pasternak wrote of Zhivago, one of those kinds who supported the regime for reasons too subtle to make him reliable. “I have no hatred for anyone,” he declared in 1922. “In general thrust, I’m closest to the Bolsheviks. And I’m willing to bolshevize around with them.” That’s just the kind of talk to get a writer of the Soviet era in trouble, though it took the authorities a quarter-century to get around to expelling Zoshchenko from the writers union. In the meantime, he wrote, including this slender collection of stories set out in the dusty, reactionary countryside, where the church still held sway and people still believed in things like love. Oh, transgressions occur there, to be sure: There are the usual vices, the usual scheming of married men to woo innocent maidens, that sort of thing. But mostly people are trying to figure out how to love according to the ideals of the new Soviet man and woman, and that’s not so easy: A teacher of calligraphy is dismissed from his post after “the subject was stricken from the curriculum,” and a music teacher who specializes in the triangle worries that he’s next: “If they take that away from me, how would I live? What, besides the triangle, can I hold onto?” Throughout, Zoshchenko, breaking the fourth wall, comments on the various inadequacies that keep him from writing as well as he can about such matters and such people: “The tale’s hero,” he writes of one piece, “is trifling and unimportant, perhaps unworthy of the attention of today’s pampered public.” That may be all the more so today, but a century later, Zoshchenko is a writer worth knowing.
A welcome rediscovery and a book that would make Gogol guffaw.Pub Date: July 31, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-231-18378-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
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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