Post-Soviet absurdity and a unflinching history rendered in effective prose.
Noirish mystery of a lost manuscript in a post-Soviet Lithuania, a country where poetry once made a difference.
“The old town has grown out of nature; it bends to the shape of the rivers that run through it, it listens to the shape of the hills. It winds and flows and hugs the earth as though it were lichen, a beautiful moss spread across an ancient log.” An aging writer, Steponas Daumantas, who can no longer write spends his time reading old poets and wandering his bizarre city, Vilnius, still reeling from decades of occupation, to indulge an obsession with photographing Russian girls. What will happen when one of them turns out to be a pretty young mother in need of help—straight to the typewriter! Jolanta is married, it turns out, but no matter, Steponas is more than happy to read her husband’s budding manuscript—he’s a writer, too—but promptly loses it at a cafe and like that old lovely city, something crucial is lost. How to get it back? Steponas eventually finds himself on the trail of the book, but the man who has it wants a hundred dollars for it, and when Jolanta shows up with a bruise it all starts to feel like noir with a smart subtle subtheme of a country losing its sense of aesthetic in favor of a fledgling mob-style capitalism. We then shift to Svetlana, a young woman navigating Vilnius’s seedy underworld of prostitution and violent men, for whom hope takes the form of a gold ring—and also that manuscript, which she might have to sell herself to get. The themes here must take us back in time—in a move that is perhaps as clunky as it is absolutely necessary—to the occupation and the atrocities from which all these shady deals have sprung. There’s plenty of skeletons in Lithuania’s closet, not to mention graves, and without going back to that era when poetry roused the soul, how will Steponas ever be able to return to “my writing. Digging. Digging away at the layers of soil. Clearing the ground.”
Post-Soviet absurdity and a unflinching history rendered in effective prose.Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-31298-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
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 Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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