A black-tinged caper narrated nicely in quick short chapters that waste little time in setting scenes as they move the tale...
The American debut of Canadian novelist and poet Caple is a Montreal-set thriller about the rise and fall of a family of counterfeiters.
Guy Vidoq’s family, if not exactly mobsters, have traditionally stood on the wrong side of the law: Guy’s father, for example, made a living by smuggling illegal aliens into Canada and the US. Guy himself is more retiring than his forebears and has lived quietly for the last 20 years in Boston, where he fled as a 16-year-old to escape his older girlfriend Martine (who had just given birth to his daughter Isabelle). Now Guy has come back to Montreal to meet Isabelle for the first time and reestablish relations with Martine, who, for the past five years, has been living with her 22-year-old lover, Harry. With the exception of Harry, who hates him on first sight, the reunion goes pretty well: Guy hits it off with Isabelle from the start, and he’s promptly seduced by Martine, whose proclivity for making love in trees or parking lots may be a signal of something that’s lost on Guy. As he recuperates from the broken foot he earned in one of Martine’s trysts, he comes to depend increasingly upon Isabelle, who soon cheerfully describes to him the counterfeiting business she and her mother run with Harry. Shocked and fearful for his daughter’s safety, Guy tries to convince the two to give up the scam, but instead he’s drawn into it himself. There’ll be two pairs of hit-men (one gay, one straight), an annual shipment nearing its deadline, a half-comic bank robbery with bizarre and deadly consequences, and a secluded hotel on the Ile d’Orleans—all of these impinging upon Guy and his family to create a great deal of trouble in the end.
A black-tinged caper narrated nicely in quick short chapters that waste little time in setting scenes as they move the tale along.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-33024-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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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