And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past witchcraft. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. 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.
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.
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. This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. Rivera also doesn’t flinch from documenting exploitation between Mexicans, as in “The Portrait,” in which a woman’s desire to have a beautiful frame for her only photograph of her deceased son turns to ashes when she’s cheated by a swindler.Ĭompelling, direct, and poignant, Rivera’s narrative avoids the extremes of both sentimentality and sensationalism.Ī retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch. And like you yourself say, only death brings rest." Another chapter , both tender and harrowing, is “The Night Before Christmas,” in which two parents try to provide a few toys for their children at Christmas only to have the mother unable to deal with the gringo culture of commercialism. Some of what Rivera recounts is heartbreaking-for example, an angry child trying to comprehend the dire conditions under which his family works: “Tell me, Mother, why? Why us, burrowed in the dirt like animals with no hope for anything? You know the only hope we have is coming out here every year. The result is a document of family life lived on the edge as well as an indictment of prejudice on both sides of the border. Rivera’s technique is to present clipped chapters of description, monologue, short narrative, and even a prayer. This is a dual-language edition that first reprints the entire novella in Spanish, followed by a graceful English translation. A look into the lives of Mexican migrant farm workers, originally published in 1971.