An agreeable confection. Enjoy it for its glittering artifice, but don’t look for depth.
Could the Devil be a sweetheart? Sure, in a topsy-turvy fantasy like this one, where fruited breads and fine salamis are almost as important as the love triangle at its heart.
Schonstein-Pinnock sets her second novel (but first to appear here) in post-apartheid South Africa, in a Cape Town enclave of first-generation Italians and Jews. The story, short on plot, focuses on Primo Verona, an Italian Jew, his wife Beatrice, and another Italian Jew, Pasquale Benvenuto, the three having been best friends since childhood. Primo is a soothsayer and magician (good magic only), while Pasquale owns a deli and is known as the best baker and salami maker in Cape Town. Beatrice and Pasquale were lovers before the shy, virginal Primo proposed to Beatrice, and, after their marriage, the three still remained friends. Then, 20 years later, Pasquale pressures Beatrice to leave Primo and return to him. The magician is devastated. His spells go awry. Without meaning to, he ruins Pasquale’s business, and then, intending to summon Beatrice home, he produces the Devil instead. Surprise! Lucifer is as angelic as before his fall: Beautiful in appearance, serene in nature, still working for God, and setting limits to man’s destructiveness, he corrects Primo’s spells and restores the deliciousness of Pasquale’s breads and meats. While Schonstein-Pinnock celebrates the kitchen, she also acknowledges man’s inhumanity through flashbacks (too many of them). Primo was raised by his father and aunt, both Holocaust survivors, while Pasquale’s father, in Rome, was forced into hiding from the Gestapo. Later, Primo and Pasquale, as conscripts, witnessed atrocities during a war in Angola. A journalist enabled Aunt Lidia to survive the journey to Auschwitz by whispering stories of angels; Pasquale’s father survived confinement by listening to the food fantasies of his comrades in hiding, a butcher and a baker. Somewhat glibly, Schonstein-Pinnock sprinkles these memories like gold dust over the brutal realities faced by young woman and small boy.
An agreeable confection. Enjoy it for its glittering artifice, but don’t look for depth.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-056242-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 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 masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.
An ambitious scientific experiment wreaks horrendous toll in the Booker-winning British author’s disturbingly eloquent sixth novel (after When We Were Orphans, 2000).
Ishiguro’s narrator, identified only as Kath(y) H., speaks to us as a 31-year-old social worker of sorts, who’s completing her tenure as a “carer,” prior to becoming herself one of the “donors” whom she visits at various “recovery centers.” The setting is “England, late 1990s”—more than two decades after Kath was raised at a rural private school (Hailsham) whose students, all children of unspecified parentage, were sheltered, encouraged to develop their intellectual and especially artistic capabilities, and groomed to become donors. Visions of Brave New World and 1984 arise as Kath recalls in gradually and increasingly harrowing detail her friendships with fellow students Ruth and Tommy (the latter a sweet, though distractible boy prone to irrational temper tantrums), their “graduation” from Hailsham and years of comparative independence at a remote halfway house (the Cottages), the painful outcome of Ruth’s breakup with Tommy (whom Kath also loves), and the discovery the adult Kath and Tommy make when (while seeking a “deferral” from carer or donor status) they seek out Hailsham’s chastened “guardians” and receive confirmation of the limits long since placed on them. With perfect pacing and infinite subtlety, Ishiguro reveals exactly as much as we need to know about how efforts to regulate the future through genetic engineering create, control, then emotionlessly destroy very real, very human lives—without ever showing us the faces of the culpable, who have “tried to convince themselves. . . . That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter.” That this stunningly brilliant fiction echoes Caryl Churchill’s superb play A Number and Margaret Atwood’s celebrated dystopian novels in no way diminishes its originality and power.
A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.Pub Date: April 11, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4339-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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