Hermetic, self-absorbed, and not at all above peevishness—and consistently fascinating by virtue of its potent rhetorical...
Naipaul’s first novel in six years is another installment in the extended fictional autobiography begun with The Enigma of Arrival (1993) and A Way in the World (1994).
Its protagonist is Willie Chandran, only son of an Indian Hindu family, who escapes from the stultifying barrenness of his passive father’s reduced intellectual and emotional circumstances for college and modest literary success in London, then a gradually unraveling affair with an admiring reader who takes him to her family’s estate in West Africa. The novel records a progress toward professional and sexual maturity that’s simultaneously a rueful realization that Willie is “living” other people’s lives rather than emerging fully into his own—and one suspects that further sequels are forthcoming. Half a Life is discursive and occasionally static, replete with exhaustive exposition and summary in place of specificity and drama—and ought, therefore, to be an irredeemably dull book. It isn’t, though, because the author projects with remarkable subtlety and plangency the experiences of failing to realize one’s promise (especially in a marvelous opening story told by Willie’s father, about his own cautious vacillations between spirituality and career-building) and being forever a fish out of water, in other countries, among intimate acquaintances who’ll never be more than strangers. Willie’s timid entry into London intellectual life and journalistic labors, terrified ascension to authorship (of a book of stories that sounds very like Naipaul’s own debut, Miguel Street), and conflicted assimilation into the privileged world of Portuguese colonials who luxuriate in “comfort . . . squeezed from the hard land, like blood out of stone” are brilliantly described as risky balancing acts accomplished within a context of uncertainty created by the pressures of an insidious caste system Willie cannot shake off, however far he travels from his inhibiting origins. This intensely claustrophobic fiction may, therefore, tell us more about the essential Naipaul than he has ever heretofore revealed.
Hermetic, self-absorbed, and not at all above peevishness—and consistently fascinating by virtue of its potent rhetorical and logical starkness. The work of a master who has rarely, if ever, written better.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2001
ISBN: 037570728X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
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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