The latest of poet-novelist Nye’s mellifluous revisionist looks at celebrated literary and historical figures (Falstaff, 1981; etc.): a high-spirited, sexy, and only occasionally tedious collection of riffs on topics suggested by the life, literary legacy, and reputation of the greatest of all writers. The story’s putative author, an octogenarian acquaintance writing several decades after the death of “WS,” is Robert Reynolds, a.k.a. “Pickleherring,” who was a boy actor enlisted to perform women’s roles (and, as Pickleherring proudly declares, did act all Shakespeare’s “nine Muses,” or great female roles). He approaches his task in a manner both ginger and dilatory, distractedly assembling the contents of 92 boxes filled with data in his humble workroom on the top floor of a particularly lively whorehouse. The story takes its time (WS isn’t born until Chapter IX) and is repeatedly sidetracked by Pickleherring’s weakness for temporizing digressions (the proper spelling of his subject’s name’), lists (of common childhood diseases, Elizabethan grammar-school curricula), and other kindred hilarities. Pickleherring considers such questions as whether WS was begotten by his father upon a lusty Queen Elizabeth (a riotously obscene chapter), whether he wrote Bacon’s essays, went to sea with Sir Francis Drake, or suffered imprisonment for selling fireworks and insulting a constable. And, in a fine frenzy of climactic speculation, Pickleherring also sorts out possible originals for the Dark Lady of the sonnets, confesses his own intimacies with WS (“on occasion . . . I . . . was the master-mistress of the great man’s passion”), and reveals not only the autobiographical dimensions of The Tempest but his own role as the sprite Ariel: “at the play’s end, he set me free, even as he freed himself in the person of Prospero.” A book to rival Anthony Burgess’s wonderful Nothing Like the Sun. Pure entertainment.
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-55970-469-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1999
Categories: HISTORICAL FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Categories: HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP
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BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
18
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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
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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