Why would a dedicated communist and atheist turn to the Bible as the theme for his final novel? Because the Bible is literature, and literature in a way that the best writers have long recognized—and the late Saramago (Small Memories, 2011, etc.) is one of the best.
Indeed: The best modern (if not modernist) writers—Mann, Kafka, Bellow, the list goes on—have always made fruitful use of the Bible, and particularly in subversive readings of it that match the collapse of faith in Western civilization’s post-Nietzschean twilight. In the Portuguese Nobel Prize winner (and communist and atheist) Saramago’s case, the story opens as it does in the Bible: with Genesis, that is, in which God is an impatient, violent and impulsive chap who isn’t quite sure why the humans he created have turned out so bad, but is swift to punish them savagely for living up to their natures. (Talk about setting someone up for failure.) Adam and Eve are tossed from the Garden of Eden, finding their way to a cave, and there they beget Cain and Abel. Writes Saramago, lowercasing his nouns, “Let us begin by clearing up certain malicious doubts about adam’s ability to make a child when he was one hundred and thirty years old.” Adam pulled it off, though, his offspring introducing murder to the list of human sins. Our eponymous Cain wanders into exile, accompanied by a semi-magical donkey (the Roman writer Apuleius seems to have stolen into the biblical mix) and has adventures aplenty. He’s a ticked-off fellow too: Saramago tells us that he was a fratricide precisely because he was not a successful deicide, and he might have enjoyed a fine career conquering such ancient cities as Sodom and Nineveh had not God always been interfering. Cain is also self-aware, if constantly unable to read the deity’s intentions; he offers himself up to God for the sacrifice God seems to be demanding, only to be made to live out his punishment for hundreds of years. Says a frustrated Cain, “I have learned one thing…That our god, the creator of heaven and earth, is completely mad." A pleasing, elegantly written allegory.
Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-547-41989-3
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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