An uneven first novel that elegantly details the love story of two young people, a Korean student and a southern beauty, whose earlier lives have been shaped by war and obsession. Like so many current debut novels, the writing here is stronger than plot or character, but Choi, in giving her male protagonist a Korean background, especially one shaped by a less familiar war—the Korean War—adds a refreshingly unusual dimension to her tale. Set in the mid-1950s, and taking place mostly at Sewanee, the University of the South, the story begins when Chuck Ahn, formerly Chang, meets Katherine Monroe. Now in her late 20’s, Katherine, living at Sewanee in her family’s old summer home, is in love with Charles Addison, an older professor—he was a classmate of her father’s at Sewanee—who seduced her the summer she was 14. Chuck, who recently served as a translator for the American forces, is there on a scholarship. As the year passes, Katherine and Chuck keep meeting by accident in scenes that alternate with their recollections of the past. Katherine recalls how she came to be seduced, and how her obsessive love for Addison has shaped, or perhaps, as one observer suggests, ruined her life. Chuck remembers the privations of the war years; his flight when the communists retook Seoul, and, in an internment camp, his betrayal of someone who’d once helped him—an act that determined him to leave Korea. A surprise proposal of marriage from Addison finally makes Katherine confront her confused feelings. In New Orleans for the summer to be with her dying mother, she invites Chuck to visit. He does, and the two at last accept their pasts, and—in the best tradition, though the affair never crackles with convincing tension—each other. While the love story never seems all that credible or affecting, Choi has tried to write a great sweep of a novel that is both moving and intelligent. The result is deserving of praise, and the author of encouragement.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-06-019149-X
Page Count: 336
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1998
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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