The author’s defiance of traditional storytelling is admirable and innovative even when it falters.
Quinones’ (Starters, 2013, etc.) collection of short stories and essays features intellectual characters examining themselves and one another as well as film and literature analyses from the author himself.
There’s a stream-of-consciousness style blanketing this book, best exemplified in the first part of the two-part title story, listing 98 examples of what Quinones calls “the one sentence short story.” They’re seemingly random assertions or snippets, mostly humorous, such as, “We spend one seventh of our lives on Tuesdays.” But a similar style appears in the fiction, as well. In “The Fizz Notorio,” for example, Eve Patricia plays her lover’s answering-machine recording, which features pieces of innocuous phone conversations. Similarly, Rolando Carspidrain in “Rumor People” overhears nearby diners at a restaurant talking about their parents’ impending ends. But while the plots are minimal, the characters are profound. Eve, for one, debates her choice to be with a man twice her age, while in “Burn Series,” shiftless Kim Demando may have a more fascinating life than her more responsible sister Dixie. Notwithstanding, the most laudable tale is perhaps the most conventional: “The Exousia,” a quirky murder mystery told almost entirely through eyewitness accounts. Quinones provides neither the dead man’s name nor details of his death, and that’s the point: what readers learn about the victim becomes his legacy, regardless of whether any of it’s true. An essay on Macbeth (“Notes on MACBETH Posthumously Left Behind by an Undistinguished Scholar”) is a little uneven, beginning as an assessment of the original play before turning into a look at several cinematic interpretations, all with equal merit. The collection ends, rather appropriately, with the metafictional second part of the title story: film enthusiast Peter pines after Myla, who apparently has no interest in him. This narrative is offset by largely superfluous notes from the author citing references or inspirations, which comprise more than half the story. Occasional tangents, such as film or book reviews, don’t seem to have been adequately researched; for example, what Quinones refers to as the “J-horror [Japanese horror] film Shutter” is actually an American remake of a Thai movie.
The author’s defiance of traditional storytelling is admirable and innovative even when it falters.Pub Date: April 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4917-9183-7
Page Count: 138
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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