Both the voice and the stories it tells transcend the dusty contrivances of much historical fiction, resulting in a novel...
A Canadian music critic shows exceptional poise and command in his debut novel, a first-person tale narrated by the Russian inventor of the theremin.
Lev Sergeyvich Termen is a real historical figure, a Russian scientist and inventor, but his voice here is all the author’s in a novel that somehow manages to feel both classically Russian (with echoes of Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn) and very contemporary. It has an epic scope that spans decades and countries but retains a tight focus through the writing of Termen, who's confined to a ship. While he's supposed to be keeping a log, he recounts a life that extends from the high society of pre-Depression America to imprisonment under Stalin. “Sometimes I am writing you a letter, Clara, and other times I am just writing, pushing type into paper, making something of my years,” he explains. Clara is the narrator’s lifelong love, though not one of the two women he married. He met her after traveling to America to promote his invention, “a musical instrument, an instrument of the air,” its pitch controlled by the movement of the hands and their proximity to the antennae. “I was the Communist magician, the conductor of the ether, sent out by the state to show off my great discoveries,” he says. His invention offered him the possibility of great riches, as American corporations had visions of mass production and “a theremin in every home.” But it also offered an opportunity for Termen to serve his homeland as an ambivalent spy, with Russian handlers conducting his business affairs and monitoring his moves. The Depression brought an end to the dreams of riches, and the rise of Stalin returned the inventor who had prospered under Lenin to his homeland as a traitor and “a pauper in a land where I thought poverty had been abolished.”
Both the voice and the stories it tells transcend the dusty contrivances of much historical fiction, resulting in a novel that feels both fresh and timeless.Pub Date: June 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-935639-81-7
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Tin House
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
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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