A minor work by Mishima, whose Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea and Death in Midsummer remain classics of modernist...
Mishima, the would-be samurai who committed suicide nearly half a century ago, turns to modern pop culture in this sardonic novella.
Rikio Mizuno is in his early 20s, but in some ways he’s still a child; he needs constant care and feeding and attention, in the way of—well, a pop star, in this case a budding film idol. Mishima, who had tried his hand at film acting and evidently didn’t think much of the experience, opens this slender story on a note of complaint on Mizuno’s part: “The fans were relentless. They leaned with all their weight over the rope lines, reaching to get just a little closer to me, cheering and screaming to catch my attention.” What’s a fellow to do but retreat into the willing arms of his assistant, who isn’t so very good-looking, her ankles “like knots in old wood,” but who’s always on hand? In Mishima’s world-weary view, the political power on a film set runs downhill from producer to director to star to supporting actors like snow melting into the sea, the players interchangeable features on a landscape; Mizuno would be disgusted at the sight of those ankles were he able to feel disgust, but, he says, he’s abandoned “that sort of reflex to the real world, the world I had forsaken.” Mizuno may live in his own world, “all hollow, all façades and make-believe,” but the others on the set are grounded enough in the here and now to keep him hopping—the director, for one, who is a master of filming scenes out of order but with the same set: “When we’re tight on time, he has no qualms about burning through shots from completely different sections of the movie." Time, Mizuno learns, is not a star’s friend. If Mizuno’s problems are of his making, Mishima’s stance seems merely ill-tempered, and the weightless story is mercifully brief.
A minor work by Mishima, whose Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea and Death in Midsummer remain classics of modernist Japanese literature.Pub Date: April 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2842-8
Page Count: 80
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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