A masterful tale about what comes of “trying to escape history”—from which, the author gives us to understand, there is no...
The sins of the fathers are visited on their progeny with a vengeance in this somber novel of life in paradise by Caputo (Acts of Faith, 2005, etc.).
In the grasslands of the San Rafael Valley, straddling the border between Arizona and Mexico, 13-year-old Ben Erskine rides out of the settlement of Lochiel with his prize possession, a hunting knife that he must put to unhappy use soon after the narrative opens on Aug. 8, 1903. Having tasted violence, Ben now seems condemned to live a life of it, serving the law on one side of the international line and the Mexican Revolution on the other, working as a soldier of fortune years after the hostilities end. Fast-forward to the present: Trying to piece his life back together after losing his wife in the attack on the World Trade Center, Gil Castle takes refuge in the Arizona homestead built by his great-uncle, Ben’s brother Jeff. Gil soon meets another man whose life was upended by 9/11. After an entire year’s crop rotted on the runway waiting for U.S. airspace to reopen, Miguel Espinoza’s produce export business failed and he became a northbound border crosser (counterbalance to early 20th-century southbound crosser Ben). Complicating bicultural, binational life are bad guys of many stripes, dealing drugs, smuggling in undocumented workers, trading in human misery and, in the end, wrapping the once-quiet but never innocent San Rafael Valley in fresh bloodshed. This is literary country well covered by Cormac McCarthy, Robert Stone, Charles Bowden and other gimlet-eyed students of the borderlands, but Caputo adds to it with his sharply observed portraits of the way people in stress actually think, act, talk and, sometimes, die. He understands and cogently conveys the region’s seductive beauty and the many dangers it poses.
A masterful tale about what comes of “trying to escape history”—from which, the author gives us to understand, there is no safe place to hide.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-375-41167-0
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
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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