A compelling existential mystery, on one level a sort of Catalan answer to Russell Banks’ The Sweet Hereafter, with a...
Beguiling, odd story of what happens to a small town when death pays an unexpected visit.
Vidreres isn’t much of a town, a forgettable spot after a blind hill that opens onto a striking view of the “luminous teeth of the Pyrenees.” Like the spectral village at the center of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, it’s full of ghosts—but also the usual human preoccupations of sex, power, betrayal, poverty, the sight of money moving “between men like a gust of wind.” Catalan author Sala makes this tiny place his own, populating it with a cast that revolves around two unfortunate dead teenagers, Jaume and Xavi Batlle, whose little Peugeot goes flying off into a tree one fateful Saturday. The crash that kills the youngsters is a mystery, though one villager, better educated than most, speculates that it’s no accident; as he tells a brawling truck driver who’s no stranger to mayhem, “A lot of accidents are suicides and no one realizes.” Sometimes an accident is just an accident, true, but this “death that doesn’t let death live” changes the lives of everyone in Vidreres. One is Iona, a teenage girl who might easily have been in the car with the boys had she accepted Jaume’s invitation to go with them that evening; now she’s left to wrestle with survivor’s guilt, because while a big-city girl might have gone to a psychiatrist or grief counselor, “in Vidreres, because of the way Vidreres was, she would have to deal with it herself.” Tough guy Miqui is no exception: he bluffs and blusters, but he’s touched, too, as is the milquetoast bank manager whose great act of midlife-crisis reconciliation is to sneak out to see a hooker and then ponder the consequences: “Had the dead boys been released from inside him, during his orgasm?” It's a fruitful question, one of many that Sala poses.
A compelling existential mystery, on one level a sort of Catalan answer to Russell Banks’ The Sweet Hereafter, with a closing as haunting as a tale by Poe. Altogether brilliant.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-931883-49-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Two Lines Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
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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