By the time the novel’s final few pages attempt to tie these various strands together, the writer’s ambition has exceeded...
Clueless student radicals, indigenous Brazilian Indians and the Internet find an uneasy mix within a novel that seems to serve as a political allegory.
During the first third of the novel, the protagonist seems to be a young law student and activist named Paulo, who shares some background with the author as well as his first name. Then he disappears from the bulk of the novel, and from Brazil, except for occasional interruptions from his new place in England, before he returns home in the final pages. He operates out of a “contagious inertia, a blind freedom that needed to be exercised urgently.” As for the political commitment of Paulo and his fellow club-hopping hipsters, it finds expression in an adage they hear at a rally: “To bring about a revolution in the world we have to bring about a revolution in ourselves. It sounds naïve, I know.” Propelling the plot is a chance encounter between the increasingly disillusioned Paulo, who considers abandoning both his studies and his politics, and a young Indian girl with whom he develops an age-inappropriate relationship, which results in her pregnancy and his disappearance. “I’m not even sure how to describe a cretin who gets a fifteen-year-old Indian girl pregnant then vanishes into thin air,” says one of the multiple narrators. The boy who results from that pregnancy—offering a thematic embodiment of the complex relationship between upper-middle-class politics and impoverished, indigenous culture—dominates the novel’s second half, emerging as an unlikely Internet performance artist and viral sensation.
By the time the novel’s final few pages attempt to tie these various strands together, the writer’s ambition has exceeded his accomplishment.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 9781908276384
Page Count: 336
Publisher: & Other Stories
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
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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