Like a set of surreal flashcards, whipping by to create a crazed, impressionistic portrait of a Europe in which everyone is...
Survivors of a sunken ship traverse a war-torn Europe in Weiner’s picaresque follow-up to The Museum of Love (1994).
Nineteen-year-old sailor Nicholas Bremml boards his first ship, the merchant marine vessel Yellow Sailor, in 1914 in the German port of Hamburg. Delicate and easily frightened, he gets his dose and more of torment from his rough-hewn crewmates. After the ship runs aground in Polish waters, thanks to a critical error Nicholas made in the engine room, the crew scrambles ashore and scatters across a Europe in chaos. Jacek Gorecki, the electrician, dodges firing squads that are shooting deserters and ends up working in a mine. Brothers Karl and Alois are like a demented comedy duo, stumbling from one misadventure to another. Initially full of humor, they slide toward bitterness. Karl declares, “The future lied to us.” Meanwhile, Nicholas searches for meaning in the gutters of Hamburg and Prague, finding it most often in the arms of prostitutes. The Yellow Sailor’s wealthy owner, Julius Bernai, glides comfortably along a more rarified path. Ensconced in a sanitarium, he falls in love with his doctor’s wife, even though he has always loudly proclaimed his homosexuality. Weiner wields his words with the ease of a career novelist. Previously compared to Burroughs and Céline, he has the grim scatological edge of the former and the man-on-the-run, trans-European ambience of the latter, but parts company with both in lacking an urge to shock. Skipping through the years with ease, replete with dreamlike scenarios, this dark carnival of the absurd (dedicated to the Brothers Quay puppeteers) has no targets or prosecutorial ambitions, which is to its credit. It all does leave one wanting more by the end, though: Perhaps in future outings, the author will be able to leave a more lasting mark on the page.
Like a set of surreal flashcards, whipping by to create a crazed, impressionistic portrait of a Europe in which everyone is on the move and nothing is certain.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2001
ISBN: 1-58567-169-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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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