After 30 years of labor, Gass (Habitations of the Word, 1984, etc.) has brought forth a big, big book that sets off, with linguistic and intellectual bravura, to explore the dark corners of history and the psyche. But it never quite reaches its destination. William Kohler, a noted historian, has recently completed his ``Great Work''—The Guilt and Innocence of Hitler's Germany. All that remains to be written is the introduction, and yet as he sits in his chair he finds himself writing a personal history of life spent mostly in a chair: ``a domestic epic that took place entirely in the mind.'' Drawings, typographical whimsies, and scabrous limericks frequently interrupt this often dense text, which, like a drop of water seen under a microscope, teems with rich and intriguing life. As Kohler writes, he hides the pages from his wife within those of his official manuscript. And he also begins to dig a tunnel from his cellar, a place for ``concealment of history beneath my exposition of it.'' An aphorist, Kohler delivers the mots—bon and juste—at the speed of a stand-up comic, but their wit and insight conceal a sickness of the soul. Most people, including himself, Kohler asserts, belong to the ``Party of the Disappointed People,'' people who recognize ``that the loss has been caused in great part by others.'' Preoccupied with evil, the nature of truth, and the effects of an individual's relationship with others, he recalls his bookish childhood with a mother who drank to remember the ``good old days'' and a bigoted father; graduate work in prewar Germany, where he hurled a brick on Kristallnacht; his unhappy marriage; and the lost love of his life, Lou, a former student. Kohler's story exhibits the same inconsistencies and deceits he finds in history: Kohler, the personal memoirist, is, it seems, as unreliable as Kohler, the eminent historian. A virtuoso performance without a grand finale. But what a remarkable show.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-43767-3
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1994
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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