An eerie tale that could have been ponderous and flat but, instead, goes completely over the edge and becomes outrageous and...
A kind of postmodern Grand Hotel, in which Power (The Good Remains, 2002, etc.) wanders through the public and private rooms of a Washington hotel where “people come, people go, nothing ever happens.”
The Royale Hotel in Washington, DC, caters to its guests, but it’s more of a home to its employees. Many of them are immigrants, like the Iraqi plumber Jedra Abdullah, who roams the building night and day searching for leaks to plug. Jedra is secretly in love with Phyllis, the all-American girl who works the front desk, but he’s too shy to take a step in her direction—until they find themselves both trapped in a broken elevator. The Iranian engineer Khouri Karimi, who stays at the hotel while attending a conference, is equally bewitched by his chambermaid Patricia, a single mother who lives with her young son and takes poetry classes at the Y. Their relationship (Patricia eventually agrees to marry Khouri) seems just as unlikely Jedra and Phyllis’s, but the Royale appears to be full of odd couples: Even Lloyd Bostitch, the obsessive, humorless and thoroughly gay manager of the hotel’s cocktail lounge falls into bed with one of his new waitresses and discovers what it’s like to have his heart broken by a woman. The strangest pairing of all brings hotel chef Leslie Downing into the arms of reclusive tenant Daniel Espirito, who lives by himself in the hotel penthouse and believes that he’s back in his childhood home in Brazil. Leslie agrees to cook some Brazilian dishes for Daniel and succeeds so well that he becomes convinced that she’s the family servant who kidnapped, seduced and initiated Daniel into a voodoo cult when he was a little boy. This delusion turns into a Proustian pleasure of the highest order for Daniel—and, weirder still, turns out to fulfill Leslie’s sexual and career fantasies alike. Someone’s gotta tell Expedia about this place.
An eerie tale that could have been ponderous and flat but, instead, goes completely over the edge and becomes outrageous and delightful.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-58243-303-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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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