A macabre little Alpine horror story elevated by masterful storytelling and language.
A remote village in Switzerland populated almost entirely with ambitious writers gets a surprise when the devil himself comes to visit.
In this very creepy novella, the award-winning Italian novelist Maurensig (Theory of Shadows, 2018, etc.) constructs a mystery with the structure of nesting dolls, folding story within story until it’s impossible to separate technique from narrative. In the outside shell of his story, Maurensig, presumably writing as himself, describes his role as “a pole of attraction for aspiring writers,” all hoping to earn the novelist’s authoritative opinion. One day, he runs across an anonymous novel called The Devil in the Drawer written by what he imagines is “a pale, blondish, aspiring writer rambling through the valleys of Switzerland.” The anonymous writer, whom Maurensig names Friedrich, describes traveling to a three-day literary conference in the hometown of Carl Jung. While taking a walk in the woods one morning, Friedrich runs across a rabid fox and a priest, Father Cornelius, who tells the young author a story about the devil coming to visit a village in rural Switzerland named Dichtersruhe: “I’m talking about the devil-made-man, flesh and blood like me and you.” Here we reach the heart of darkness as the devil introduces himself as Bernhard Fuchs, a publisher from Lucerne who plans to turn the town’s old mill into a publishing house and establish a literary prize, setting off a wave of madness among the town’s writers. By the time Maurensig puts a weapon into the priest’s hand, Chekhov’s maxim is in full effect. The language, translated by Appel (Snapshots, 2019, etc.), is both florid and fluid as you might imagine of Maurensig’s gifts. Whether it succeeds as a commentary on the writing life or the publishing industry probably depends on the reader, but regardless, Maurensig gives us a masterfully constructed gothic horror story designed to keep aspiring writers up at night.
A macabre little Alpine horror story elevated by masterful storytelling and language.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64286-013-9
Page Count: 120
Publisher: World Editions
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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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