A clever spoof about work and the relationships formed there.
A week in the life of a group of worker bees whose firm is becoming unhinged.
Copenhagen-based expatriate Kennedy (In the Company of Angels, 2010, etc.) can be an acquired taste. But this second book in his Copenhagen Quartet is probably one of his most accessible. Like other workplace satires, the novel fashions the workplace as fishbowl and invites the reader to examine the flora and fauna within. Those who work at the Tank, a firm so mind-numbing that it’s difficult to tell what the company does at all, are a mixed bag. Anxious executive Frederick Breathwaite is ready to shoot himself in the foot financially in order to ensure a spot at the company for his rebellious son, Jes. CEO Martin Kampman puts on a fierce face at work even as he struggles on the home front. Harald Jaeger is the office ladies’ man whose passionate exterior belies his unrequited love for Birgitte Sommer, his married colleague. Assorted other figures, ranging from the office curmudgeon to the Afghan owners of a local fix-it shop, fill out an eccentric cast. Kennedy has fun with his locale-specific commentary; in one scene, a doctor advises Harald that his hearing is fine—Danes just tend to mumble when they’re afraid of being quoted. But where the novel truly succeeds is in its depictions of relationships, whether it’s Harald’s hesitant romance or the odd friendship between sons Jes Breathwaite and Adam Kampman. In the end, what lies beneath is just as important as that which we see on the surface. “And you know what happens when you have a life without a foundation?” Jes warns. “It runs along okay for a while until one day you look down and see there’s nothing beneath you and you fall.”
A clever spoof about work and the relationships formed there.Pub Date: March 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-60819-081-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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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