The weird contrast of Christianity at its most murderous and India at its most sumptuous jars the senses as crime and...
The Inquisition visits on Portuguese Goa a great terror worthy of Josef Stalin, testing a fragile family to the limit.
Tiago Zarco, Zimler’s half-Jewish, half-Indian narrator, opens this rich, fast-moving story recalling the events that landed him in a prison dedicated to those the Inquisition has set aside for its special attention. Zarco, whose mother died shortly after the birth of his only sibling, Sofia, was fondly raised by his Portuguese-born Jewish father, an illustrator for a nearby Mogul price, and by Nupi, the Indian cook his mother salvaged from life as a beggar. As descendants of artist Berekiah Zarco, protagonist of Zimler’s 1998 The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon, Sofia and Tiago exhibit considerable graphic skills that their father has honed. But those refined talents are of no use at all when the family is caught in the virtuously sadistic grip of the Dominicans, betrayed by someone close to them. The most likely suspects are the awful Portuguese aunt Maria, wife of Tiago’s merchant uncle Isaac, a Christian convert; and Wadi, the Arab orphan adopted by Maria and Isaac. Maria detests her husband’s Jewish background and family, and handsome arrogant Wadi bears a long-held grudge against Tiago, possibly for spurning his adolescent love. Tiago’s father is the first victim of the holy terror, a prison suicide whose death was facilitated by his grieving son, the next to be imprisoned. Tiago, whose fiancée is pregnant, saves himself by professing Christianity, but his sentence to prison in Lisbon, rather than leading to the repentance desired by the Catholics, gives him time to construct a complex revenge against both his betrayer and the priest who sentenced him and his father. When he at last returns to Goa, he believes he knows whom he must punish, but he is compelled to have absolute proof.
The weird contrast of Christianity at its most murderous and India at its most sumptuous jars the senses as crime and punishment work their usual spell in this deeply absorbing work.Pub Date: July 26, 2005
ISBN: 0-385-33881-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Delta
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2005
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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