An erudite yet melancholy meditation on an artist’s life, Woodward’s tale, often a comedy of the absurd, is peopled by an...
Woodward (A Curious Earth, 2008, etc.) extracts black comedy from the bumbling life of Kenneth Brill, a young artist of confused sexuality.
All English wit and writerly turn of phrase—"a brow ploughed with parallel wrinkles," "little coy nymphs rising from fairy pools"—Woodward’s first-person narrative begins late in World War II as protagonist Brill relates his life to a military attorney, Davies, an archetypal upper-class twit. Groin-shot and invalided home after a misconstrued homosexual seduction—"his spittle was sweetness in my mouth"—Lt. Brill’s being court-martialed not for that, but for painting landscapes around his family home, Swan’s Rest; he's charged with encoding his paintings to inform the Nazis about a planned airfield. Brill’s father, a former vaudevillian, grew prosperous selling human waste sludge as fertilizer, but the government now "will brush us aside like human dust." Brill offers childhood memories, then moves on to his studies at the Slade School of Art. There, he ironically faints at the sight of a nude male model—"All my artistic life I had wanted nothing more than to tackle the human form"—and then is expelled for hiring prostitutes to pose. A Slade instructor, half-Italian, half-Spanish Arturo Somarco—a flamboyant, duplicitous character—attempts seduction. Somarco later helps a drunken and politically ignorant Brill dry out at Hillmead Farm, a Fascist hotbed. Meanwhile, April Card, once Brill’s fellow instructor at prestigious Berryman’s Academy, "by some semi-conscious manipulation of my deeper internal divisions " ends up pregnant, a state reached after farce-filled sexual misadventures that begin with birdwatching in flagrante delicto. Woodward’s settings—time and place—are artfully rendered in England and during Brill’s Camouflage Corp North African desert service.
An erudite yet melancholy meditation on an artist’s life, Woodward’s tale, often a comedy of the absurd, is peopled by an abundance of colorful characters.Pub Date: May 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-60598-782-8
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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
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