Respectful, playful, and often entertaining—though just as often puzzling. Barker’s fans will enjoy the outing, forgiving...
A headily curry-scented tale, part fable and part imaginative biography, by postmodern maven Barker (In The Approaches, 2014, etc.).
Devotees of Indian religious thought will know at least the name of Sri Ramakrishna, the 19th-century guru who was deeply influential in the spread of Vedanta and other expressions of modern theistic Hinduism. He is perhaps less well known as the illiterate keeper of a temple to Kali who was as devoted to its benefactor, the widow Rani, as to the goddess. Barker calls her lively reconstruction of this episode “a painstakingly constructed, slightly mischievous, and occasionally provocative/chaotic mosaic.” That’s about right, though the chaotic parts deserve underscoring, especially when they involve such odd turns as an anachronistic point of view delivered by a camera fitted to a certain bird, which in turn yields a couple of Python-esque moments; catch one and see, Barker counsels: “This shouldn’t be too difficult because the pre–1855 Indian swift is quite silly and highly accident-prone….” Why the ploy? Kali only knows. Her name lies hidden in the very title of the book, though the actual cabbage kin has a role, too, as does the Bengali city of Kolkata, which means “field of Kali,” where such a vegetable might be grown. Suspend disbelief while you’re catching the bird, and suspend the ordinary expectations of plot development; still, this is no postmodern, attention-deficit-begging exercise in the manner of a Danielewski or Kristeva but instead a more straightforward if still idiosyncratic story that evokes Eleanor Catton and even William Vollmann at points. In the end, that story centers on how faith works and religious communities and traditions are formed, sometimes, it seems, accidentally as much as by design: “The Brahmini has a very controlling manner and is of strong opinions, and after only a very short acquaintance with Uncle she became convinced that Uncle was an incarnation of God.”
Respectful, playful, and often entertaining—though just as often puzzling. Barker’s fans will enjoy the outing, forgiving her quirks.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62779-719-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
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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