Evocative but drenched in often overwrought imagery (“sees the sky peel off the earth that is the distance between the land...
A poignant tale of love and ambition overwhelmed by self-consciously poetic prose: in a first US appearance for Zimbabwean author Vera.
Set in a black township of the 1940s in what was then white-ruled Rhodesia, it’s both an evocation of a place, and a story about a young woman with big dreams. The township is a place of one-room shacks, beer halls, and kwela music. Children sit on empty, rusted, metal drums and watch the passing cars; country women abandon their tribal names and, calling themselves “Gertrude” or “Melody,” brew moonshine or become prostitutes. The men, haunted by memories of fathers killed by the white settlers, work and find release in the township women. When Fumbatha meets much younger Phephelaphi, whose mother Gertrude was recently murdered, he is soon in love—as is Phephelaphi, who leaves Zandile, a friend of her mother's and a prostitute who has been taking care of her, and moves in with Fumbatha. Initially, she feels “safe in his adoration,” but as time passes and he's away working, she's lonely. She visits the local beer hall to hear the kwela music and, better-educated than her mother, applies, without confiding in Fumbatha, to train as a nurse. She’s accepted in the program but, now pregnant, induces an abortion, which proves a strain on the marriage. As both Phephelaphi and Fumbatha find the love that once had filled them now diminished by Phephelaphi’s assertion of independence and dreams of a different and better life, Phephelaphi learns some unsettling truths about her mother and Zandile.
Evocative but drenched in often overwrought imagery (“sees the sky peel off the earth that is the distance between the land and the sky”; “her body a flame searching: nothing can sanction courage but desire”) that makes for a diffuse fable more than a particularized novel.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-374-29186-1
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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