Many American readers know altogether too little about what’s happening to the north. And, to judge by this volume, what’s...
A welcome collection of short fiction from the winners of the Journey Prize, Canada’s take on something like the Pushcart (though with a nicer purse).
Now in its 25th year, the Journey Prize is awarded annually to “an emerging writer of distinction,” with $10,000 to the winner. Moreover, the annual prize story volume is considered the “most prestigious annual fiction anthology in the country.” Certainly, this anniversary collection, judged by past prizewinner Hill, along with National Post Books Editor Medley and novelist Wangersky, shows why. Noting that the submissions are read blind, making the Journey “as pure a prize as you’ll find in Canada,” the editors lead off with a decidedly fugitive piece by Laura Legge, which closes with a lovely bit of poetry: “I feel I could float with the tide, lay back and let it move me, like a sprig of sea kelp, like a caravel skimming some long corridor of blue, easily, with the sun as its sentinel.” That would do Leonard Cohen proud, and readers will be eager to hear more from her. Another selection, by Natalie Morrill, takes an original if typographically challenging approach to depicting voices speaking at once (three parallel columns, one for each voice present), and voices spoken in crisis at that. In another, Doretta Lau nicely subverts ethnic stereotypes over the battlefield of a communal meal: “I looked around at the table. Yellow Peril was slurping up her noodles with gusto. Riceboy was shoveling rice into his mouth like a champion competitive eater, while Suzie Wrong took big gulps of her drink.” There’s not a dud here, though, it being Canada, there’s plenty of snow (for which see especially Jay Brown’s well-observed story “The Egyptians”).
Many American readers know altogether too little about what’s happening to the north. And, to judge by this volume, what’s happening in Canada is all to the good.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-7710-4736-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
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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