Wonderful. Alert all who hunger for the stimulus of real intellectual entertainment.
From Krüger (Himmelfarb, 1993, etc.), prize-winning author in his native Germany, a seriocomic gem about a modern composer whose past—it seems—comes back to haunt him.
Some twenty years ago, our mature and thoughtful narrator (he’s referred to once as György) attended a modern music conference in Budapest, still behind the Iron Curtain. Such a visit wasn’t unusual—he went to many such affairs in eastern bloc Europe, not necessarily with very high hopes for the future of modern music (his own comfortable income is from the popular music he writes for TV detective shows), though certainly with some hope, and certainly with the aim of nurturing and maintaining a sense of principle in an increasingly unprincipled (an unaesthetic) world. The conference in Budapest, though, did differ in one way—in the passionate affair György had with the Hungarian singer Maria. And thereby hangs a tale. Two decades later, who should be sent by Maria to appear in György’s Munich apartment—maybe to remain for keeps, it seems—but 20-year old cellist Judit, who just might be—could she be?—György’s daughter. Readers will never know for sure, but they’ll love the rollicking tale that follows as a huge crop of Hungarian relatives gathers to celebrate Judit’s 20th birthday, all but pushing György out of house and home, guests who include the wondrous eccentric, Uncle Sandor, also Maria herself, even two children whose parents for a time seem mysteriously to disappear altogether. Alas, how can György conceivably hope to get any work done on his already-stalled grand opus—his opera on the subject of Osip Mandelstam? Politics and history, history and art, after all, constitute the real subject here, and possibly Krüger’s whole novel is a kind of allegory of German responsibility for the post–WWII ravages that befell eastern Europe. Either way, there’s comedy here aplenty amid the colorful and the eccentric, great learning worn lightly, the whole delivered by a fine and intelligent tumble of words.
Wonderful. Alert all who hunger for the stimulus of real intellectual entertainment.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-15-100591-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2003
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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