Still, newcomer Jha offers a detailed look at an immigrant’s life in Paris, both its hardships and pleasures.
The difficult journey to independence of a young Gujarati woman with a remarkable sense of smell.
When Leela’s father is killed in a riot, her family decides to leave their adopted home of Kenya. At 18, Leela is sent to live with relatives in Paris, while her mother and two brothers go to England, promising to retrieve her as soon as they’re settled. Leela soon realizes that her mother, who has quickly remarried, has no intention of sending for her, leaving Leela to manage in the unhappy household of her aunt and uncle. Used to a privileged life back in Africa, where she was preparing for university, she now finds herself cooking vast, complex Indian meals for a thankless aunt and helping her uncle in his small market. When Leela is thrown out (after revealing, in a fit of anger, how her uncle entertains his female customers), she’s fortunate enough to be taken in by a glamorous, well-connected model who refers to Leela as her “Indian friend.” Leela then finds a position as an au pair—and of course also a position as the father’s mistress. Throughout the story, it's Leela’s refined sense of smell that teaches her about her new country and the people in it, enabling her to create the most sublime culinary works. It also enables—and plagues—her with the ability to smell her own shame. She learns French and gradually makes friends, but only when she becomes mistress to a rich and powerful man does she learn the importance of identity—something she’s been sorely lacking. Most of the narrative has little to do with choices Leela actually makes and much to do with her luck in meeting influential people. The close, when she finally chooses a life of her own, comes not a moment too soon.
Still, newcomer Jha offers a detailed look at an immigrant’s life in Paris, both its hardships and pleasures.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-56947-241-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
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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