A pensive, beautifully written tour de force of modern European literature, worthy of shelving alongside Döblin, Pasternak...
A robust epic of a Mitteleuropa lurching out of totalitarianism into whatever passes for modern society—“not a terrain without perils,” as one of the principal characters grimly observes.
Hungarian novelist Nádas’ stories are parallel in just the sense that Plutarch’s lives are: They draw the reader to a moralizing conclusion. Otherwise, they are parallel only for short distances, like a train line out on the Magyar Plain, leading, as many of the characters here know, to horrible places of mass death. Nádas’ long tale opens with a scene befitting Stieg Larsson (though not indebted to it in any way: Nádas has been working on this book, it’s said, since before Larsson started writing fiction): As the Berlin Wall begins to crumble, a body, half-buried in snow, “half dangling off a bench,” is found in that city. The young man who found it lacks a sufficiently compelling alibi, while the police detective investigating the scene, a scholarly man with a doctorate and a classically derived sense of stoicism and gloom, suspects the worst of everyone. Who is this dead man, whose body bears “an odor that he had received during his last hours from another body”? From whose body does that sweet odor come? The detective theorizes that fetishism is involved—and indeed, Nádas’ book is as sexually fraught as anything by Kundera—while the suspect rabbits off to the countryside, opening a tale that involves dozens of characters: Jews, Gypsies, Communists, anticommunists, a Chaucerian parade of humankind, arrayed across what used to be called Central Europe. War is a constant as friends drift apart and come back together over the decades; sometimes the characters have names and addresses, other times they are nearly anonymous figures swept up in events, such as one Gypsy prisoner of war called “the man with the glasses.” Each character’s life overlaps with another’s, not always neatly. Nádas is forgiving of their many frailties (“Ilonka Weisz wasn’t hard, just a common little girl with a big mouth”), but in the end, under the rumble of artillery fire and the crush of history, all that is left of their lives—and ours—is “the ethereal shadows of poplars.”
A pensive, beautifully written tour de force of modern European literature, worthy of shelving alongside Döblin, Pasternak and Mann.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-22976-4
Page Count: 1152
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2011
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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