Gordimer (The Pickup, 2001, etc.) can still deliver a rabbit punch to the solar plexus as efficiently as anybody now...
The collision of personal and political agendas and ideals is analyzed with radiant precision and wit in the 1991 Nobel laureate’s ninth collection: eight adamantine stories and two ambitious novellas.
Several of the former are commandingly terse, including the parabolic title story, in which an earthquake reveals both a cluttered ocean floor and the consequences in store for “scavengers” who scurry to its depths; a wry tale of inchoate sexual surrender (“The Diamond Mine”); the monologue of an assassin visiting the grave of his widely beloved victim (“Homage”); and a mordant peek at the transitory nature of earthly pleasures seen in the context of a malarial mosquito’s lurking presence (“An Emissary”). Gordimer’s underappreciated comic gift sparkles in “The Generation Gap,” a beautifully handled tale showing how adult children react when their aging father leaves their mother for a much younger woman. It’s a rich revelation of generational and gender incompatibility and miscommunication, which ends with a jolt as Gordimer engineers a sudden shift of viewpoint. She’s a brilliant technician, as evidenced by a masterly style that blends serpentine discursive sentences with crisp, clipped fragments: the effect is of a roving intelligence constantly surprised, and stimulated to further exploration, by its own insights. Her methods work to near-perfection in the novellas “Karma,” in which a deceased insurance executive’s spirit makes successive returns to earth (as, e.g., a male, a female, a stillborn baby) “to continue his experience in another place, time”; and in its counterpart, “Mission Statement,” the story of a middle-aged Englishwoman, Roberta Blayne, who works for an international aid agency in an impoverished African nation, where she has a sexual relationship with a native “Deputy Director of Land Affairs”—but declines the opportunity to become his “second wife.” The tale’s an amazingly compact study of racial and social divisions and their stifling denial of individual freedom.
Gordimer (The Pickup, 2001, etc.) can still deliver a rabbit punch to the solar plexus as efficiently as anybody now writing. Maybe they should give her the Nobel Prize again.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-374-19090-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
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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