A splendidly realized account of fate and circumstance, richly narrated with a good ear for the music of history and...
First-novelist Karnezis (stories: Little Infamies, Feb. 2003) works out a nice improvisation on the classic Homeric themes of exile and cunning—here, as played out in the aftermath of the disastrous 1922 Anatolian war.
Brigadier Nestor, a has-been officer addicted to morphine and still grieving over the death of his wife a year before, is stranded in Turkey with a squadron of Greek soldiers. They have lost the war and may soon end up prisoners—or victims—of the Turks unless Nestor finds a way to get them home. Order is breaking down: theft is rampant (even Nestor’s cigars have been pinched), food is short (the men are living on nothing but cornmeal), corruption is endemic (the chaplain has to bribe the cook for communion wafers), and there are signs of mutiny brewing (Communist leaflets appear mysteriously in the barracks day after day). One of the men deserts, and soon after a prize stallion breaks loose and bolts from the corral. In pursuit of the horse, the troops discover an almost deserted Greek village and proceed to set up camp there in relative safety. They also capture the deserter and uncover the Communist agitator. It looks as though Nestor is on the way to restoring order in the ranks until the chaplain, under pressure from a local prostitute he has set out to redeem, intervenes and attempts to stop the executions. Under ordinary circumstances Nestor would hear out the good father’s pleas and carry on, but this time the chaplain has two strong cards to play: a massacre of Turkish prisoners that Nestor authorized some time back, and a luckless foreign correspondent stranded in the village who hasn’t filed a story in months. The fortunes of war, it seems, can shift as quickly as the sands of the Anatolian desert.
A splendidly realized account of fate and circumstance, richly narrated with a good ear for the music of history and character alike.Pub Date: March 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-374-20480-2
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
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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