Aiming for a story of human connection to the universe, this novel falters after a strong start.
A promising debut novel sweeps through a series of stories that join human lives to the natural world in South Asia.
The first book of fiction by Mumbai-based journalist Swarup is made up of four linked novellas. Their titles—Islands, Faultline, Valley, and Snow Desert—suggest the book’s emphasis on how people connect (or don’t) to their planet. Islands is a strong start, the engaging story of an arranged marriage between two very different people that grows into genuine love. Girija Prasad, India born and Oxford educated, is a man of science. His bride, Chanda Devi, has more education than many Indian women but is also a mystic who routinely speaks to ghosts and trees and can sometimes see the future. In the middle of the 20th century, Girija’s government job takes them to the remote, wildly beautiful Andaman Islands, a penal colony under the British Empire that newly independent India is trying to figure out what to do with. The book vividly recounts their often humorous, sometimes surreal, and ultimately touching relationship. The subsequent three sections are not as well developed. Faultline delves into the lives of Mary, a Burmese woman who was Girija and Chanda’s housekeeper, and her son, a political prisoner in Burma who has renamed himself Plato. Valley branches off from that section to follow Plato’s best friend, a smuggler from Nepal. Thapa is “a man nearing sixty, besotted by a girl young enough to be his granddaughter” whom he meets in a dance bar in Kathmandu. Thapa’s travels lead to the final section, Snow Desert, and the story of Apo, the aged leader of an isolated village in the icy Karakoram Mountains, in the no-man’s land between Pakistan and India. In all of the sections, the author writes of characters’ many visions of geological time and of the web of life endangered by human actions: “In the approaching horizon of the future, the calamity is a certain uncertainty, the greatest one there ever will be. It links them all.” Visions are remarkable experiences that are notoriously difficult to capture in language, and here they fall into ineffectual repetition.
Aiming for a story of human connection to the universe, this novel falters after a strong start.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13255-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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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