Berger also treats us to reflections on Borges (buried in Geneva), Rembrandt’s Polish Rider, the Cro-Magnon and nights of...
Discrete scenes from a mellow, largely autobiographical journey through time and space.
Barriers collapse as the past invades the present and the dead mingle with the living in this distinguished European’s latest fiction. European, yes, because Berger (The Shape of a Pocket, 2001, etc.), an expatriate Englishman long resident in France, has the appropriate historical consciousness and breadth of vision—his journey here includes stops in Lisbon, Geneva, Krakow, London and Madrid. But it’s the dead who make the story so singular, especially Berger’s mother, who shows up in Lisbon, out of the blue. In appearance an old woman (she’s been dead ten years), she speaks at times with the coquettish voice of a 17-year-old. She and Berger exchange memories while shopping in a beautifully evoked Lisbon. “I’ve learnt a lot since my death,” she says teasingly, and the idea that the dead have a better perspective than mere mortals seems self-evident. Berger’s father doesn’t appear in person, but the son recalls their contentious relationship, softened by Berger the child’s intuitive understanding of the WWI ghosts haunting his father, a former infantry officer. The dead are everywhere. In a Krakow marketplace, Berger finds Ken, his greatest childhood influence and passeur (guide), while down the staircase of a Madrid hotel comes another teacher, the intensely solitary Tyler. There are certain key concepts here: endurance is one, invincibility another. The closing section is given over to the living, as an old friend brings his bride to the family home in the Polish countryside. Berger does weddings well (see To The Wedding, 1995), but one misses the dead; nothing else quite equals that opening Lisbon section, the raillery of dead mother and living son, the powerful demonstration that “everything is a continuum.”
Berger also treats us to reflections on Borges (buried in Geneva), Rembrandt’s Polish Rider, the Cro-Magnon and nights of innocent, unconsummated passion with a fellow art student as the bombs fell over wartime London. His endless curiosity restores the spirits.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-42336-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2005
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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