Art imitates life, or life imitates art, or something.
A novel about a novelist who has apparently obliterated the distinction between life and literature.
The narrator, a writer named Christoph, enjoyed breakthrough success with a novel detailing his romance with an actress named Magdalena. He had arrived at a crossroads, in both his relationship and his fiction, where he felt he had to choose between romantic happiness and literary fulfillment. The novel which had begun as a love story thus became a story of that love falling apart. “I didn’t wreck my life...I decided in favor of literature, and made certain sacrifices,” he explains to a younger woman named Lena, which is, of course, short for Magdalena. She is also an actress and is in love with an aspiring writer named Chris, who appears to be writing the same novel that Christoph had already written. What’s going on here? Lena thinks she knows: “There are simple explanations for everything, she said in a cheery voice. What’s that then? I asked. You’re mad, and this is all a product of your imagination.” Maybe so, but, if so, Lena might also be a product of the novelist’s imagination, and perhaps Magdalena as well, just as all of these characters are the products of the imagination of the Swiss novelist who has made a career out of such literary postmodern gamesmanship (All Days Are Night, 2014, etc.). This novel we’re reading might well be the same one the fictional novelist has written, or is rewriting, the one that brought him the breakthrough success, the one that he could never follow with another. This is the novel he is explaining in great detail to Lena, in short chapters alternating with other short chapters that detail what is going on between them, and what is going on between her and her Chris, and what parallels there are between these lives they are leading and the life with Magdalena that inspired his novel some 15 years earlier. “Maybe I was just imagining everything,” the novelist as narrator ponders at one point, recalling a period of his life that “was all so long ago now that it seemed unreal in my memory, like a bad dream on waking up.”
Art imitates life, or life imitates art, or something.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-59051-979-0
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 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
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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