Playful and erudite, sprinkled with philosophy and politics, funny in places and melancholy in others, this novella, like...
Early Soviet writer Krzhizhanovsky (1887-1950; Autobiography of a Corpse, 2013, etc.) revives the eponymous teller of tall tales and sets him loose in 1920s Moscow.
Baron Munchausen (based on a real historical figure mythologized in the 1700s) is still an irrepressible fabulist at the age of 200. After befriending a poet named Ernst Unding (German for "earnest nonsense"), he leaves Berlin for the fogs of London. The pace is madcap, the tone wry; a poet at work suffers an "attack of egoism—what literary historians call 'inspiration.' " At Mad Bean Cottage on Bayswater Road, Munchausen dictates postprandial aphorisms and entertains illustrious guests with stories of Diderot and Catherine the Great. Next he's sent to Moscow "as a correspondent," and the bulk of the novella is the account he subsequently gives at the Royal Society of London. In Communist Russia, he finds that "everything has been eaten, including the onion domes." The baron visits "the compiler of The Dictionary of Omissions, Complete & Unabridged...the famous geographer who discovered the Spur of the Moment..." and "a ceremonial session of the Association for the Study of Last Year's Snow." "Red science is forging ahead," Lenin claims, but Munchausen sees a poorly equipped scientist forced to write formulas on the black back of a carriage which rolls away midscribble. Munchausen rejects "the trammels of truth," prays to Saint Nobody, and plays a "complex game of phantasms against facts." In a last meeting he tells his poet friend, "I created not-yet-created worlds, lighted and doused suns, ripped up old orbits, and traced new paths in the universe; I did not discover new countries, oh no, I invented them." But "the Country About Which One Cannot Lie" defeats him in what is ultimately a parable about the artistic imagination under Soviet censorship.
Playful and erudite, sprinkled with philosophy and politics, funny in places and melancholy in others, this novella, like most of Krzhizhanovsky's work, remained unpublished during his lifetime; how lucky that we can read it now.Pub Date: Dec. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-68137-028-6
Page Count: 168
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
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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