Despite the fascinating combination of post–civil war Nigeria and good gossip, Atta’s novel can’t quite overcome the ennui...
A glimpse into the insular world of upper-class Nigeria during the mid-1970s.
Remi Lawal is a middle-aged shop owner living in the exclusive Ikoyi neighborhood of Lagos in 1976. When she meets Frances Cooke, an American art dealer who has come to Nigeria to collect beads that are seemingly valuable to everyone but Nigerians, it begins a series of tête-à-têtes between the two in which Remi describes life among Nigeria’s elite while Frances offers comparatively little about herself. What looms over Remi’s descriptions of Nigerian life, however, is the question of whether Frances is a CIA agent, an idea initially floated by Remi’s husband, Tunde, a banker who has recently been “retired” from his government job due to a military coup. Despite Tunde’s understandable suspicions, Remi is unconvinced and proceeds to invite Frances into her inner circle, wherein larger questions of colonialism, marriage, motherhood, and Nigerian identity are interwoven with the everyday occurrences that make up Remi’s rather privileged life. Unfortunately, the award-winning Atta (A Bit of Difference, 2012), though meticulous in rehearsing the various maneuvers that have gotten Nigeria to this moment, overburdens the first half of the novel with details of Remi’s daily life that could have been left on the cutting-room floor. The novel doesn’t really find its legs until the second half, when it finally crescendos with yet another coup and an incident at a golf club, in which Frances plays a key role, which could rival a reality-TV show starring bored and moneyed housewives.
Despite the fascinating combination of post–civil war Nigeria and good gossip, Atta’s novel can’t quite overcome the ennui that dominates the life of its main character.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62371-985-2
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Interlink
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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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