Read Bolaño, and you’ll understand what he means.
Exile, alienation and a fatalistic sense of the impermanence of human connections and relations dominate this collection of 14 stories written by the late (1953–2003), brilliant Chilean author.
Bolaño (who sometimes appears in the stories, identified as “B.”) was a leftist intellectual haunted by lingering fallout from his country’s political catastrophes (notably, a 1973 military coup), including destroyed marriages and families, betrayed ideals and unrealized dreams. His stories—which echo the allegorical terseness of his recently translated novels By Night in Chile (2003) and Distant Star (2004)—phlegmatically record such unconsummated or indistinct experiences as an unnamed writer’s friendship through correspondence with an older writer whose burden of hardships is too complex to be shared (“Sensini”); a failed poet’s compensation for his artistic ineptness in an imaginative escape from reality (“Enrique Martin”); a Chilean exile’s gradually revelatory encounter with a countryman unmanned and enervated by the annihilation of his hopes for a more just society (“Days of 1978”); and a minor writer’s small triumph when he acts as “secretary, messenger, or valet” to more accomplished contemporaries during the perilous days of the French Resistance (“Henri Simon Leprince”). A few stories (“Phone Calls,” “Anne Moore’s Life”) misfire or fail to play to Bolaño’s strengths (the uncharacteristically comic “Gómez Palacio,” the fragmentary autobiographical piece “Dance Card”). But at his best, he echoes the elliptical precision of Borges, Kafka, Mexican surrealist Juan Rulfo and the great prestidigitator Julio Cortázar—notably, in the superb title story, which portrays a young intellectual’s Acapulco vacation with his father as a slowly dawning apprehension of approaching death; and the subtly exfoliating “Dentist,” in which exchanges of stories and a vision of how they’re made confirms for its narrator (what he has already intuited) that “We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain.”
Read Bolaño, and you’ll understand what he means.Pub Date: May 31, 2006
ISBN: 0-8112-1634-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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