A deeply moving meditation on identity and history, the personal and the political, blurring the boundaries between truth...
An extraordinary life in exile inspires a multilayered novel.
With perhaps a nod toward Kafka, Swedish novelist Anyuru (They Will Drown in Their Mothers' Tears, 2019, etc.) opens on a protagonist named only as P facing his interrogators, who ask him, “Why did you come back?” “Back” is to Africa, where P says he has returned with an offer to fly a crop duster in Zambia. He had left his native Uganda some years earlier to train as a fighter pilot in Greece. After Idi Amin staged his coup in 1971 and began executing some of those who had resisted him, P felt he could not return home. Greece, in the midst of its own political upheaval, said he could no longer fly. He had no home to return to in Africa, no home that would accept him in Europe. His passport had become worse than useless; he feared it might provide evidence against him. He has no idea what those holding him think his crimes might be. They have no idea where his loyalty lies. Perhaps he has no idea where his loyalty lies. “If you disappeared one day, just disappeared, who would miss you?” he was asked. And now he knows that no one would. Until a different narrative perspective enters the novel, a first-person narrator that the reader identifies with the author, an unnamed narrator who says that P is his father and that P has been telling him the stories that have filled the novel, stories that the novelist has perhaps embellished, has certainly recast in his own words. Like the father, the son has no country, no place where the marriage of his Swedish mother and Ugandan father, who are now divorced, makes him feel at home. “I travel between places I try to form into a nation,” says the son. “I think about how I am a tree with its roots pulled up.” In other words, like father, like son. The presence of the son signals to the reader that P survived and escaped, that he lived to become a father, while the son’s story illuminates his father’s final days. As the father’s story progresses forward and the son’s looks backward, they meet in a place filled with “all these stories that try to figure out my origins,” says the son. “There is no history. I just come from here. From this summer, when my father is dying.”
A deeply moving meditation on identity and history, the personal and the political, blurring the boundaries between truth and fiction.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64286-044-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: World Editions
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
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
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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