A magnum opus from a leading young writer takes on the meaning of exile, identity, faith, and the limits of endurance.
While one man struggles with his origins, a ragged group of wanderers walks across the steppe.
A small band of refugees is walking across the Eurasian steppe. They’d signed up to be ferried, illegally, across the border to a better life. They’d been tricked. Now, they must walk. They are starving to death. One by one, their members drop. Meanwhile, in a small, provincial town far away, a police commissioner named Pontus Beg is growing old. As he goes about clearing up the minor transgressions of his community—a man has run over another man’s sheep—he struggles to make sense of his position in the wider world. What puzzles him is the memory of a song his mother sang to him when he was a child. It’s a Yiddish song; but why would his mother sing a Yiddish song? As Beg uncovers a secret his mother kept from him, a secret that changes the way he understands his own identity, that ever shrinking band of refugees keeps creeping through the steppe. They’re not unlike the Israelites who wandered for 40 years in the wilderness. Gradually, Beg’s story begins to merge with the lonely band’s, a band that includes a tall man, a young boy, an addict, a poacher, an Ethiopian, and a woman. This latest novel from Libris Prize winner Wieringa (Little Caesar, 2012, etc.) is a quiet masterpiece. Wieringa combines the primal, raw, archetypal vision of José Saramago with the apocalyptic sweep of Cormac McCarthy. The result is entirely his own. In Garrett’s elegant translation, Wieringa’s prose is lucid as cut glass, his images stark, his landscape desolate and otherworldly at the same time that it is contemporary. His unalloyed depiction of emigration will reverberate keenly in a Europe facing ever growing numbers of exiles, evacuees, escapees of war. It will reverberate, as well, in a United States muddled by its own border policies. To open the doors or shut them? As it turns out, that’s only one of the questions.
A magnum opus from a leading young writer takes on the meaning of exile, identity, faith, and the limits of endurance.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2016
ISBN: 9781612195650
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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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