A distressingly detached collection.
A Brazilian author’s debut explores ennui and obsession among young sophisticates.
In “Bianca and Me,” the 12th story of 21 in Parisot’s collection, the narrator describes Bianca: “Nothing seemed to interest her; she spoke in an indifferent, cold tone of voice, with a disdainful inflection as if she had a low opinion of everyone, even me, who she claimed to love.” This description proves apt for many of the characters in these briefly sketched stories: young, cosmopolitan figures are deeply, chronically bored by monogamy, heterosexuality, moderation, and bourgeois life in general. Their ennui frequently drives them further and further to seek thrills. In “A Trivial Story,” a wealthy teenager turns to drugs after eating disorders lose their allure. In “Tableau Vivant,” a young woman partakes in a live sex show in order to lose her virginity to another woman. But if these characters transgress what may be more traditional social boundaries, Parisot explores how women get revenge on men who go too far by any standard: a number of stories feature a female protagonist who murders—or tries to murder—a man who has mistreated her. While we might root for these women on principle, even readers with a high tolerance for unlikable personae may struggle with just about all of Parisot’s characters, who say things like, “The most horrible thing in the world is fat people” and “People with dignity shouldn’t live past thirty-five.” This isn’t the only difficulty the book presents. It's hard to write fiction about boredom in an engaging way, and the clipped, expository prose here flattens the reading experience even further. It may be that this is all a social critique, but Parisot plays it so straight that it’s hard to tell.
A distressingly detached collection.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62897-145-3
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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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