Within the deliberately fractured text, themes echo and time folds and unfolds. A spare, artfully constructed meditation on...
Set in Mexico and Argentina, Bicecci's debut novel concerns itself with time, disappearance, Venn diagrams, and the circularity of the universe.
Just before Veronica's 15th birthday, her mother disappears, leaving the girl and her brother with an "interminable absence" for which "there's no recognizable cause....Only a series of scattered, meaningless clues. A set emptying out little by little. Disordered fragments." Time in this novel, for both the narrator, Veronica, and the reader, moves disjointedly, in fits and starts. Characters and events are introduced out of order, and the text is broken by line drawings, diagrams, and blank spaces. Tenuously holding these fragments together are Veronica's romantic struggles and her ongoing search for understanding and connection. After a failed love affair, she returns to her mother's apartment ("the bunker"), where she attempts to fix a sagging wall with plywood, tracing the growth rings in paint and meditating on dendrochronology: "each wood shaving contains discontinuous moments from the life of the tree." Beyond the details of past and present human relationships, the political hangs like a shadow. Veronica takes a job organizing the effects of a deceased writer who, like her parents, fled Argentina for Mexico in the 1970s; the task makes her feel divided between parallel universes in which she coexists with the absence of her mother and the late author of Exile. For the writer, Veronica realizes, the places she "needs to return to no longer exist, and that is the root of her tragedy...the consequences of dictatorship are felt afterwards, long afterwards." In a documentary she watches with her brother, people in the Atacama Desert search for the remains of those "disappeared" by the government. Her mother's own disappearance remains mysterious. "Love confirms the circularity of the universe," the writer's lover claims in a telegram, and the ending plays with this idea.
Within the deliberately fractured text, themes echo and time folds and unfolds. A spare, artfully constructed meditation on loss, both personal and national.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-56689-494-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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