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THE HOUSE OF SILENCE

Combining elements of the folk tale, mystery, and romance, Busquets’ novel is bound to please readers with its new take on...

Ten years after a famous composer’s death, four musicians are brought together for a concert memorializing the strange man who touched each of their lives in surprising ways.

Late one evening, two violinists with a complicated history, a conductor struggling to live up to his father’s memory, and an elderly maid with a secret attend a tense rehearsal in a Berlin concert hall. As the novel unfolds, Catalan writer Busquets introduces us to each of their voices: there’s Maria, an Andalusian maid who cared for the enigmatic composer Karl T. in his Barcelona apartment for more than 40 years; Anna, a prima donna violinist who plays with virtuosic skill but no heart; Anna’s former violin teacher Teresa, suffering from the wounds of a tragic romance; and Mark, Karl T.’s son, separated from his father by the harsh realities of the Berlin Wall. Their overlapping perspectives provide fractured glimpses of Karl T., the German composer who, even in death, holds them each in thrall. Little do they know that their lives and careers are also bound together by a single mistake: the loss of Karl T.’s prized possession, a beautiful violin that “made magic...as if it held the sun inside it.” In contrast to the complex emotional lives of the characters, Busquets' writing (and Lethem’s translation) lends a fairy-tale flatness to the tightly woven mystery, leading the reader through a maze of intrigue, loss, and romance with clear, brisk prose. Busquets’ dreamy tale is the more interesting for its attention to female competition, class, linguistic barriers, and the specter of fascism that haunts both Spain and Eastern Europe. Her novel of music and fate confirms a universal suspicion: “sometimes it seems we know everything about somebody and, really, we know nothing, or very little.”

Combining elements of the folk tale, mystery, and romance, Busquets’ novel is bound to please readers with its new take on Old World charm—and the secrets we keep even from ourselves.

Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-68245-030-7

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Regan Arts

Review Posted Online: July 19, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016

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THE HANDMAID'S TALE

Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.

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The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.

Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.

Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.

Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985

ISBN: 038549081X

Page Count: -

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985

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CIRCE

Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.

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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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