In all, a revelatory tale that reads like the testimony of a shell-shocked survivor.
A disjointed, dreamlike (and prizewinning) tale by Barcelona journalist Amat descends into the coca farms of Bahia Negra, Colombia.
A Marxist journalist on the lam, Wilson Cervantes and his Barcelonian girlfriend, Rat, have taken refuge in a seaside farm village near his aunt Irma’s house. In the midst of a civil war, the impoverished black planters of this jungle region are at the mercy of those who sabotage the land for their own purposes: the corrupt drug dealers, who descend in airplanes to take the result of the farmers’ hard toil, the salt cocaine, and leave a paltry cut; the ruthless guerrillas, who periodically infiltrate the villages for arbitrary executions; and the paramilitary police, who routinely burn and fumigate the coca and poppy farms. “In his life as an ordinary citizen,” Amat intimates obliquely, Wilson “wrote articles that upset both the army and the guerrilla,” and yet the hot, trancelike state the two lovers fall into gradually obliterates both the reasons for their being in Bahia Negra and any motivation for leaving. Wilson intends to write a novel, yet he drinks heavily and writes nothing, while Rat observes the wacky locals, like young Aida, black Poncho’s third wife (actually his daughter), who witnesses the guerrillas murder him and loses her mind. Aida reveals troubling truths about other executions she’s witnessed and leads Rat to the Dead Women’s Well, where the two watch all-night rumba parties in which coca leaves are purposefully pulverized by the intoxicated dancers for the next stage of treatment. The gathering of menacing forces against the defenseless farmers results in a violent conflagration that finally pulls the narrative out of what has seemed a drug-induced stupor. The translation is awkward, complicated by Amat’s penchant for whimsical metaphors, non-sequiturs, and shifting points of view.
In all, a revelatory tale that reads like the testimony of a shell-shocked survivor.Pub Date: March 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-87286-435-9
Page Count: 250
Publisher: City Lights
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
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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