A wonderfully affecting new collection of 12 stories by the Anglo-Irish master (Felicia's Journey, 1995, etc.), whose sympathetic portrayals of lonely, betrayed, and self-betraying people are unsurpassed by any of his contemporaries. Though Trevor disdains to raise his voice, melodrama and tragedy alike are vividly present in his careful analyses of relationships unravelling, dangers that lurk beneath the mildest and most respectable of surfaces, lifelong dreams and painstaking plans that come to nothing. His plainspoken prose and scrupulous fairness to all of his characters betoken a modesty and restraint that throw into bold dramatic relief his unjudging (one almost wants to say courteous) examinations of people who surprise us with the range and depth of their often buried emotions. The best pieces in this collection—his eighth—are on a par with Trevor's finest ever. In "After Rain," for example, a thirtyish spinster (one uses such words when discussing Trevor), on the latest of her many vacation trips to Italy, observes a painting of the Annunciation and is stimulated by it to perceive how she has, all along, been the cause of her own romantic unhappiness. In "The Potato Dealer"—one of the few stories set in Ireland—an unwed pregnant girl, married off to a dull older man, cannot conceal the identity of her baby's father and finds that, though her confession pains and burdens her patient husband, both he and she can bear the disgrace. Both "A Friendship" and "Timothy's Birthday" describe quiet acts of rebellion that will have painful long-lasting consequences. In "Gilbert's Mother"—an amazing example of Trevor's celebrated grasp of abnormal psychology—a mother who realizes that her grown son is a rapist and murderer decides she must keep his secret ("Her role was only to accept: He had a screw loose, she had willed him to be born"). Dependably brilliant work from one of Chekhov's most accomplished disciples.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-670-87007-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1996
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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