Not that de Rosnay ever wrote literary fiction, but previous books like Sarah’s Key (2008) have more emotional substance...
A best-selling French author with writer's block agonizes at a luxurious Italian resort in de Rosnay’s oddly static latest (The House I Loved, 2012, etc.).
The main action here consists of 29-year-old Nicolas Kolt sitting around feeling sorry for himself at the Gallo Nero off the Tuscan coast. Oh, sure, he’s rich and famous, thanks to his globally best-selling first novel, The Envelope. But that was published four years ago and was based on the true history of his enigmatic father. Without real-life inspiration to lean on, Nicolas is having a hard time coming up with a new book. Though he assures his anxious publisher that he's writing away, he’s mostly wasting time on social media, exchanging pornographic instant messages with a married woman in Germany, and being told off by old friends for having become lazy, selfish and spoiled. Readers will heartily agree as they endure Nicolas’ solipsistic musings about how much he misses his former love Delphine and how he should really call his mother, all the while checking his Facebook page to see if there are any new photos taken by an anonymous fan who's also vacationing at the Gallo Nero. The swanky setting is over-the-top enough for a Harold Robbins novel (ditto the Blackberry-enabled sex scenes), and de Rosnay’s way of demonstrating that Nicolas is a real writer is to show him watching the other guests, which might work if his observations ever went beyond superficial judgments. His 22-year-old girlfriend, Malvina, is a whiny bore, the extensive flashbacks not much more interesting as they limn Nicolas’ childhood, his father’s mysterious death and his discovery of previously unknown Russian roots. The climactic shipwreck that finally gives Nicolas new literary material is ridiculous but a relief; at least we won’t have to hear any more about his writer’s block.
Not that de Rosnay ever wrote literary fiction, but previous books like Sarah’s Key (2008) have more emotional substance than this.Pub Date: April 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-04513-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
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 masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.
An ambitious scientific experiment wreaks horrendous toll in the Booker-winning British author’s disturbingly eloquent sixth novel (after When We Were Orphans, 2000).
Ishiguro’s narrator, identified only as Kath(y) H., speaks to us as a 31-year-old social worker of sorts, who’s completing her tenure as a “carer,” prior to becoming herself one of the “donors” whom she visits at various “recovery centers.” The setting is “England, late 1990s”—more than two decades after Kath was raised at a rural private school (Hailsham) whose students, all children of unspecified parentage, were sheltered, encouraged to develop their intellectual and especially artistic capabilities, and groomed to become donors. Visions of Brave New World and 1984 arise as Kath recalls in gradually and increasingly harrowing detail her friendships with fellow students Ruth and Tommy (the latter a sweet, though distractible boy prone to irrational temper tantrums), their “graduation” from Hailsham and years of comparative independence at a remote halfway house (the Cottages), the painful outcome of Ruth’s breakup with Tommy (whom Kath also loves), and the discovery the adult Kath and Tommy make when (while seeking a “deferral” from carer or donor status) they seek out Hailsham’s chastened “guardians” and receive confirmation of the limits long since placed on them. With perfect pacing and infinite subtlety, Ishiguro reveals exactly as much as we need to know about how efforts to regulate the future through genetic engineering create, control, then emotionlessly destroy very real, very human lives—without ever showing us the faces of the culpable, who have “tried to convince themselves. . . . That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter.” That this stunningly brilliant fiction echoes Caryl Churchill’s superb play A Number and Margaret Atwood’s celebrated dystopian novels in no way diminishes its originality and power.
A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.Pub Date: April 11, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4339-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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