Constantly fascinating but never quite remarkable.
A quiet part-time comedian leaves his family grocery business to try his luck at what turn out to be two bizarre pursuits in this thoughtful, offbeat novel.
Every Friday, Theo Potiris goes to the racetrack and places a bet to see how his luck is holding before deciding whether or not he should take the stand-up stage or go home to his apartment above his family’s old supermarket, Provisions K. This unprepossessing Greek Jewish Quebecois on the brink of middle age is the protagonist of Michaels’ (Us Conductors, 2014) second novel. With his girlfriend, Lou, on a retreat in a distant desert, Theo emerges from his cocoon into two odd worlds of adventure. Prompted by his mother’s death and his young niece's massive win while under his care at the racetrack, Theo finds his gateway to novelty is a trio of Italian French-Canadian sisters and a weather-obsessed statistician named Matisse. Matisse works for one of the sisters, who has built up an empire founded on a computer algorithm that makes money betting that it can predict the future better than the bookies. After a short spell working with them, Theo leaves to join the other two sisters, who are part of a criminal gang that steals luck worldwide. Luck looks like and is forensically indistinguishable from sand but makes the owner lucky. Despite these characters of slippery panglobal provenance, a paranoid millionaire, a mysterious billionaire, and some thrilling action in Taiwan, Michaels maintains a calm, quiet tone for Theo that’s “neither panicky nor proud.” Theo mentions the work of Paul Auster, and this book feels like an homage to The Music of Chance—with its strange biographical tangents and theme of fortune. We see glimpses of the comedy, but sadly, though Michaels was himself an occasional onstage comedian, we never quite see the philosophical insight he claims for Theo’s comedy. Our hero is, in the end, inscrutable in ways that are psychologically convincing but narratively unsatisfying.
Constantly fascinating but never quite remarkable.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-947793-63-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Tin House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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