In Halkin’s beautifully fluid translation (he has also supplied a perceptive introduction), we see Agnon’s piquant...
The last of Agnon’s six novels to be translated from Hebrew into English, this 1951 work describes the travails of a young Jew in Berlin during the Great War. Agnon (1888–1970) won the Nobel in 1966.
The novel is partly autobiographical. The narrator has the same first name as the author (Shmuel Yosef) and an identical migratory background: from Galicia to Palestine to Berlin and back to Palestine. Shmuel is constantly on the move, from one boarding house to another; he can never find the right combination of landlady, room and furnishings. His search duplicates in miniature the search of Jews for a homeland. Simultaneously the war has thrown Shmuel off his game. He has been unable to work on his book, a history of clothing, since the war began. Instead he carries out an assignment to assess the library of the late Dr. Levi, as requested by the scholar’s widow. This involves a train ride to a town outside of Leipzig. The trip proves futile; the house is locked and the widow is in the hospital. But Shmuel runs into an old friend, a former actress now operating a nursing home for war victims. One of her patients has been transformed into a golem, a zombie, by battlefield horrors. He attaches himself to Shmuel and thus is reunited with his mother, Shmuel’s Berlin landlady, who had dreamt of this homecoming. Dreams, legends and anecdotes make up much of the story, which is buoyed by mordant humor and absurdist touches: Shmuel will return to Leipzig to transport the enormous hat of a visiting Christian professor, an “authority” on ancient Israel who knows no Hebrew. The contentiousness of German and Eastern European Jews is another theme, but it’s the war that looms over everything, a character in its own right.
In Halkin’s beautifully fluid translation (he has also supplied a perceptive introduction), we see Agnon’s piquant illustration of a disorientation that feels quite contemporary.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59264-214-4
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Toby Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
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
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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