An earnest and somber tale of rural life that gets tangled in its metaphorical brush.
A man returns to his native Bulgaria from America and receives an education in family history, romance, and local folklore.
The narrator of Penkov’s debut novel (East of the West: A Country in Stories, 2011) is a broke graduate student. In hopes of a financial boost, he heads back to the mountainous patch of Bulgaria his family fled during the Communist era, looking to sell off his share of family land. But his grandfather has already sold that land, which is being developed into wind farms (threatening the highly symbolic migratory storks). That gives the story its initial conflict, but the drama Penkov means to conjure up has a longer reach. The family home sits at the confluence of Turkish, Greek, and Slavic cultures, as well as Christian and Muslim faiths, and the story draws on regional folk stories, most prominently the nestinari—“fire dancers” who perform rituals to sanctify the place. As the narrator becomes increasingly immersed in the local society, he learns more about his grandfather’s complex history and also falls for Elif, the seemingly unattainable daughter of a local imam. “Don’t bloody your hands with superstition, stay away from the madness,” our hero is cautioned. But he can’t quite resist it. Penkov can write elegantly about history, folklore, and mythology—which he means to argue are very much part of the present—and the early push and pull between his hero and Elif has humor and tension. But the novel doesn’t persuasively mix its varied elements, sometimes overlayering the grandfather’s back story and local lore. And though the chapters are typically brief and breezy, they’re often bogged down in wooly observation, softening the impacts of the tragedies and revelations that mark the closing chapters.
An earnest and somber tale of rural life that gets tangled in its metaphorical brush.Pub Date: March 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-374-22279-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
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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