This is not one of this important writer’s best books; those are still Maps (1999) and Links (2004). But Farah knows his...
A woman “young of heart, strong of body, questionable of judgment, and yet unbending in her doggedness to set things in motion” dominates the prizewinning Somali author’s ambitious, accusatory tenth novel.
It’s set primarily in Mogadiscio, to which native Somalian Cambara returns from Toronto, whence she had emigrated to marry (a lawyer, Wardi), and where her son Dalmar, a victim of his father’s abuse, had died in a drowning accident. Grief-stricken, but stubbornly determined to recover her family’s home from the “minor warlord” who has appropriated it, Cambara reunites with her cousin (and former “putative husband”) Zaak, a drug-addicted underachiever who had returned home preceding her, and efficiently deflects the well-intentioned meddling of her formidable mother, Arda. In a bifurcated narrative that renders detailed flashbacks in past tense, present action in present tense, Farah depicts Cambara’s impulsive plunge into a civil-war–torn landscape, as she fends off possible rapists and thieves, forms bonds with freelance bodyguard Dajaal and his best friend, Bile (to whom she is instantly attracted), befriends two street boys (“armed youth” SilkHair and cryptic preadolescent Gacal) and, through the efforts of tireless, well-connected aid worker Kiin, enters into solidarity with the activist Women’s Network, which encourages her to write a play dramatizing their common plight: “Men are a dead loss to us, and they father wars, our miseries.” This book is both more and less than a feminist parable. Farah offers a powerful, unpleasantly convincing picture of a society in ruins, while lucidly portraying the efficacy of courage and ingenuity marshaled against chaotic forces of exploitation and violence. But Cambara is an unconvincing superwoman: physically imposing, brilliant, indomitable earth mother, creative artist—a veritable African Joan of Arc. Armed teenagers and warlords alike are no match for her.
This is not one of this important writer’s best books; those are still Maps (1999) and Links (2004). But Farah knows his troubled homeland intimately, and everything he writes commands respectful attention.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2007
ISBN: 1-59448-924-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2007
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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