Bynum is undoubtedly gifted with language and well-versed in literary allusion, but her first is almost unreadable and...
A self-consciously exquisite first novel, written in one-page (sometimes one-sentence) chapters, about the difference between a young French girl’s dreams and her real life.
Madeleine lies in a deep sleep, watched over by her jam-making mother, her distracted farmer father, and her various younger siblings. Madeleine’s hands are wrapped in bandages, having been dipped in lye as punishment for her sexual relations with the town half-wit. Meanwhile, like an x-rated Sleeping Beauty or Dorothy, if Kansas and Oz were equally weird, Madeleine is dreaming stories and characters: Saint Michel, whom she idolizes; a woman who sprouts wings; a woman whose husband carves her face on his viola; a man with a magic gift for expressive flatulence. Eventually in her dreams, also possibly in her past, Madeleine travels to Paris to live as the storybook Madeleine with Mme. Clavel (oddly the original Madeleine is not credited in the notes at the back of the book, where Bynum lists her “literary” references). Madeleine runs away from Mme. Clavel’s convent to join a gypsy circus, where she meets the characters of her dreams. Back home, no one will buy preserves from Madeleine’s mother anymore, and the siblings are getting into trouble. While her mother appears to dote on Madeleine, she can’t help escalating acts of violence toward the unconscious girl. As Madeleine sleeps on, she and the gypsies are supported by a rich widow who pays Madeleine to slap the flatulence-maker’s naked backside. Madeleine and the circus photographer both fall in love with the flatulence-maker, who ends up in the same asylum where the half-wit who molested Madeleine has been placed. In other words, dream and reality begin to converge. Madeleine wakes long enough to organize a performance in the village barn. Then she falls back to sleep while the villagers watch.
Bynum is undoubtedly gifted with language and well-versed in literary allusion, but her first is almost unreadable and frankly sleep-inducing.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-15-101059-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
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
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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