A pensive, beautifully written tour de force of modern European literature, worthy of shelving alongside Döblin, Pasternak...
A robust epic of a Mitteleuropa lurching out of totalitarianism into whatever passes for modern society—“not a terrain without perils,” as one of the principal characters grimly observes.
Hungarian novelist Nádas’ stories are parallel in just the sense that Plutarch’s lives are: They draw the reader to a moralizing conclusion. Otherwise, they are parallel only for short distances, like a train line out on the Magyar Plain, leading, as many of the characters here know, to horrible places of mass death. Nádas’ long tale opens with a scene befitting Stieg Larsson (though not indebted to it in any way: Nádas has been working on this book, it’s said, since before Larsson started writing fiction): As the Berlin Wall begins to crumble, a body, half-buried in snow, “half dangling off a bench,” is found in that city. The young man who found it lacks a sufficiently compelling alibi, while the police detective investigating the scene, a scholarly man with a doctorate and a classically derived sense of stoicism and gloom, suspects the worst of everyone. Who is this dead man, whose body bears “an odor that he had received during his last hours from another body”? From whose body does that sweet odor come? The detective theorizes that fetishism is involved—and indeed, Nádas’ book is as sexually fraught as anything by Kundera—while the suspect rabbits off to the countryside, opening a tale that involves dozens of characters: Jews, Gypsies, Communists, anticommunists, a Chaucerian parade of humankind, arrayed across what used to be called Central Europe. War is a constant as friends drift apart and come back together over the decades; sometimes the characters have names and addresses, other times they are nearly anonymous figures swept up in events, such as one Gypsy prisoner of war called “the man with the glasses.” Each character’s life overlaps with another’s, not always neatly. Nádas is forgiving of their many frailties (“Ilonka Weisz wasn’t hard, just a common little girl with a big mouth”), but in the end, under the rumble of artillery fire and the crush of history, all that is left of their lives—and ours—is “the ethereal shadows of poplars.”
A pensive, beautifully written tour de force of modern European literature, worthy of shelving alongside Döblin, Pasternak and Mann.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-22976-4
Page Count: 1152
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2011
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
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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