Evocative but incomplete.
A manuscript found in Baghdad’s Directorate of General Security recalls life under Saddam Hussein’s regime.
I’jaam, explains Iraqi expatriate Antoon in a prefatory note, is the Arabic word used to describe the diacritical dots added to the basic alphabet to represent different phonetic characters. Since these dots can also clarify a word’s meaning, I’jaam has come to mean “elucidating” or “clarifying.” A manuscript written entirely without diacritics is clearly intended to be unintelligible, and that’s the premise of Antoon’s novel. It’s 1989; a manuscript without diacritics is unearthed in the dreaded security headquarters, where a request is made for “qualified personnel…to insert the diacritics and write a brief report of the manuscript’s contents.” The resulting document unfolds a series of vignettes of a government-regulated life. Furat, the manuscript’s author, is a poet and student of literature in Baghdad. A limp makes him unfit for service in the army, but he feels the restraints of Hussein’s oppressive dictatorship in countless other ways. His grandmother, who raised him after his parents were killed, and his girlfriend Areej plead with him to be compliant, but Furat finds it difficult to live and study under such conditions. Though his protests are minor—trying to write his senior thesis on 1984 (banned by the state) and using newspapers with pictures of the Leader as toilet paper—he is nonetheless carted off to prison by guards posing as students. Furat’s manuscript swings among an account of his past, flashes of life in prison and hopeful hallucinations envisioning reunions with his grandmother and Areej. His rantings become increasingly incomprehensible and end just as suddenly as they began. Marginal notes and an addendum by the state translator nervously cavil at Furat’s consistent disparagement of the government, dismissing the text as a “disgraceful transgression.” Antoon’s frenetic tone is very effective, and Furat’s unraveling feels heartbreakingly familiar. But the novel is choppy and unfinished, ending far too soon. What could have been well-developed, timely fiction reads like a character sketch.
Evocative but incomplete.Pub Date: June 15, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-87286-457-3
Page Count: 112
Publisher: City Lights
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2007
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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