This great writer’s rhetorical and constructive mastery remain unimpaired. But he’s still beating horses so long dead that...
The 2001 Nobel winner continues the story of Willie Chandran (Half a Life, 2001), an Indian-born writer (and presumable authorial surrogate).
We first glimpse Willie, a perpetual itinerant and outsider, after he’s left his Portuguese wife and Africa and moved to Berlin, where he’s staying with his sister Sarojini and her German husband. Sarojini’s revolutionary ardor rebukes his phlegmatic indifference to causes and allegiances, and so—somewhat improbably—Willie travels to India to join a Communist-led rebellion on behalf of that country’s underprivileged and exploited lower castes. He spends several years as a “soldier” and courier—vacillating between hopeful commitment and the cynical suspicion that his comrades are driven by unworthy agendas and doomed to fail—before surrendering to police and accepting imprisonment as the fate he deserves. Then his release is unexpectedly secured by old friend Roger, a British attorney, who argues Willie’s special status as an internationally significant writer. Freed, Willie returns to London and the home of Roger and the wife (Perdita) with whom he shares a desiccated, loveless open marriage. The novel’s emphases then shift curiously, as Willie’s reentry into intellectual life (working for a small architectural magazine) is subordinated to his subdued rediscovery of sex (with equally passive Perdita) and sharpened awareness of the slough of amoral cheapness into which England—and, by extension, Western civilization—seems to him to have lapsed. Naipaul ends with Willie’s characteristically resigned expostulation “It’s wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That’s where the mischief starts.” Magic Seeds (the title alludes ironically to the tale of Jack and the Beanstalk) is a superbly elaborated screed, which eloquently restates the case for perceiving the contemporary world as irretrievably fallen: it’s a case Naipaul has been making for decades.
This great writer’s rhetorical and constructive mastery remain unimpaired. But he’s still beating horses so long dead that the stench is becoming overpowering.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-40736-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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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