Miller, Andrew Books

The Optimists

Andrew Miller

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Journey into the heart of darkness 5 out of 5 stars.
8 of 8 people found this review helpful.

The Optimists is a remarkable, essential novel - but it does take a brave reader as well as a brave writer to follow the book's journey and to engage with such dark and troubling themes. The story concerns Clem Glass (names have an almost mythic significance throughout this novel) a photojournalist who has witnessed a genocide of obscene proportions in an unnamed African township. The novel is not about the massacre itself - though there are fragments of description of it - but about the aftermath, Clem's attempts at coping and some sort of recovery. Arguably, the novel's premise provides a way of exploring recovery from any form of intense and shocking grief, charting as it does the stages - denial, apathy, anger and so on - that are well-documented in any account of bereavement.
Clem, like many of us without the protection of an unshakable set of religious beliefs, must find a way to go on living while shaken to the core by what he's seen. The novel quietly explores and, for the most part dismisses, some of the possibilities on offer - separatism from the world as personified by Clem's father and his life in a religious order; acts of charity as pursued by Clem's former colleague Silverman. Clem's own solution revolves around his extended family, specifically from acts of kindness while caring for his sister, Clare, an art historian who is suffering from a breakdown. The siblings retreat to the landscape of their childhood, to an everyday existence of strawberry jam and haircuts, which provides a gentle respite from their damaged lives. At the end of the novel, Clem attempts to confront the man responsible for the massacre, a way of staring deep into the devil's eyes - though Miller, to his considerable credit, does not present this as an easy resolution to Clem, but instead takes us through a series of stranger and more jolting realisations.
In outline this novel may it sound like a philosophical treatise, but it was one of the most emotionally affecting novels I've read for a long time. In spite of its bleakness, in spite of the way it forces the reader to confront when they would far rather pull back, there is always hope running through its pages, always a sense that recovery can and will happen, but uncompromisingly, realistically, a thoughtful and intelligent optimism rather than the oblivious joy of fools. Time and again when I was reading I was struck by the way fiction is a more powerful medium than television or film in exploring emotional experience in close focus - the images in one's head are not only more horrific, but once conjured seemingly impossible to escape from. Like Clem Glass, I simply couldn't make the pictures go away.
As in all Miller's novels the writing is immaculate, resonant and beautiful. His use of imagery is as poetic and precise as ever, and is all the more striking for being used more sparsely here than in the lush world of Ingenious Pain or Casanova. His ability to evoke a very English sort of family life, or to capture the sense of a place in a few phrases is unrivalled. He is undoubtedly one of the best writers of his generation.
I know The Optimists has made me see the world differently, which is the mark of any worthwhile book.. I loved this novel in spite of all the tears and nightmares it brought me.

Editorial Review:

Clem Glass was a successful photojournalist, firm in the belief that photographs could capture truth and beauty. Until he went to Africa and witnessed the aftermath of a genocidal massacre.
Clem returns to London with his faith in human nature shattered and his life derailed. Nothing-work, love, sex-can rouse his interest and no other outlook can restore his faith. The one person Clem is able to connect with is his sister, who has made her own sudden retreat from reality into the shadows of mental illness, and he finds some peace nursing her back to health in rural Somerset. Then news arrives that offers him the chance to confront the source of his nightmares.

In The Optimists, Miller explores the perilously thin line between self-delusion and optimism.

(04/18/2005)

Oxygen

Andrew Miller

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In Andrew Miller's third novel, Oxygen, the award-winning author of Ingenious Pain offers an intense, claustrophobic tale of parallel lives, of regret and redemption.

A family reunion of sorts is underway in the summer of 1997 for Alice, a newly retired, long-widowed schoolteacher, dying of cancer at her home in the English countryside. Gathered at her side are her two sons: Alec, a myopic, indecisive translator, and the more gregarious Larry, an unemployed TV soap star whose glittering U.S. career is about to take a nosedive into the shabby territory of porn films, so he can stave off bankruptcy and hold on to his disintegrating marriage. The counterpoint to this scenario is Laszlo Lazar, Hungarian exile and feted playwright, whose latest work, Oxygen, Alec is translating. Lazar, who has a comfortable existence in one of the more fashionable Paris quartiers, seems to possess everything that Alec does not: critical success, a loving partner, a longstanding circle of artistic friends. Yet Lazar is tormented by memories of the 1956 uprising and a comrade he feels he betrayed. When a political splinter group asks him to undertake a mysterious mission, he seizes his chance to atone for the past.

Shifting between a quintessentially English idyll, the carousing bars of Paris, the physical and emotional aridity of California, and a Budapest of the past and present, Miller skillfully evokes his characters' stories and their common theme--the liberation of self--even if the end result is self-destruction. He writes compassionately of the terminally ill Alice, clinging to the last vestiges of life, the last agonizing breath: "Was that the last to go? Certain gestures, reflexes, a way of cocking the head or moving the hands in speech?" He reminds us that human beings have choices, even in despair, and he provides a suitably ambiguous ending to round off a wise and engrossing novel. --Catherine Taylor, Amazon.co.uk

Ingenious Pain (Harvest Book)

Andrew Miller

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 29 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

"What does the world need most--a good, ordinary man, or one who is outstanding, albeit with a heart of ice?" This is the question at the heart of Andrew Miller's first novel, Ingenious Pain, a book set during the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment. The outstanding man in question is James Dyer, an English freak of nature who, since birth, has been impervious to physical pain. Not only does he feel no pain, but he recovers from all injuries in record time. By turns a shill for a quack pain- reliever at county fairs, an object of study by a wealthy collector of human oddities, and, eventually, a surgeon, James Dyer--and through him the reader--gains exposure to a panoply of 18th-century philosophical thought, medical practice, historic events, and larger-than-life rogues and heroes, both fictional and real.

As a surgeon, James Dyer excels, and his inability to feel--whether physical pain himself or empathy for others--seems only to enhance his skill with a knife. James slices and dices and cures without a scintilla of compassion while his reputation grows, until at last he arrives in Russia and the mystery of his unusual quality is resolved. Miller navigates his complicated story and exotic locales with unswerving confidence, bolstered, no doubt, by thorough research. James Dyer is not a character who invites love, but his adventures make for intelligent, deeply pleasurable reading.

The Eternal Husband (Hesperus Classics)

Fyodor Dostoevsky

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

A great overview for those who have never read Dostoevsky before 5 out of 5 stars.
7 of 7 people found this review helpful.

This is an entertaining novella that will give you an idea of Dostoevsky's genius. Like his great works (Crime and Punishment, Brothers K, The Idiot, The Possessed), it has a lot of psychological power and displays his style of writing. It has enough depth to it that you really get into the story and the characters, unlike some of his short stories. However, it does not have all the philosophy present in his longer works. As Dostoevsky is also known for his philosophical and political debates, some may lament the loss of it in The Eternal Husband. However, many newcomers to Dostoevsky find that the philosophy drags and that they get lost in it. For that reason, The Eternal Husband is an easy read and great for people who have never read Dostoevsky before.

Editorial Review:

From one of the world's greatest prose writers, this is a remarkable psychological novel examining the duality of the human consciousness. Velchaninov, a rich and idle man undergoing a moral crisis, is confronted in St. Petersburg by Trusotsky, the loyal husband of Velchaninov’s former lover. Trusotsky informs Velchaninov that his wife has died, and from here this fascinating novella charts the development of the two men’s lives. Beautifully portraying the confused and changing feelings the two men have for one another, this work moves through guilt, hatred, and love. This is Dostoevsky at his best, engaging with his favored themes of tortured minds and neurosis, and treating them in a captivating and highly revealing way.

The Marquise of O

Heinrich von Kleist

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Editorial Review:

An ingenious “whodunit” and one of the greatest works of German literature, The Marquise of O– subverts the 18th-century notion of the infallibility of man and reveals the true ambiguity and caprice of humanity. Held captive by a band of unspeakable ruffians, the Marquise of O– is rescued before they can subject her to a fate worse than death. So how can it be that, some months later, she finds herself pregnant? Believing herself fully innocent, although failing to convince her prudish family of her honor, she places an advertisement asking the perpetrator to identify himself. Heinrich von Kleist is the first of the great dramatists of 19th-century German literature.

Casanova in Love (Harvest Book)

Andrew Miller

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Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In his first novel, Ingenious Pain, Andrew Miller told the tale of a man who felt too little; in his second novel, he features a man who feels too much. Set like its predecessor at the end of the 18th century, Casanova in Love follows the fortunes of that legendary lover whose name is now synonymous with womanizer. Miller drew parts of his story from Giacamo Casanova's own Histoire de Ma Vie, and indeed the novel begins in the German castle where the real magilla spent his last years writing his autobiography. There, as the now elderly and frail adventurer burns letters and papers, he is interrupted by a mysterious woman who has come to hear the story of one particular era in his past:

Imagine him now: thirty-eight years of age, big chin, big nose, big eyes in a face of "African tint," a guardsman's brawny chest and shoulders, stepping down the gangplank in Dover harbour.... In the customs house he gave his name as de Seingalt, the Chevalier de Seingalt, a citizen of France. Lies, of course, or something like them, but it pleased him to dream up names for himself; it was also politic. Europe--the parts of it that counted--was a small place, and in his travels he had met at least half the people of influence in the entire continent. "Casanova" was in too many documents, too many secret reports and in the minds of too many people he would rather not encounter again.

After many years spent adventuring on the Continent, Casanova has come to England to find peace, "a span of quietude in which to find himself again; serenity." But he is not the kind of man who can long endure solitude. Soon he has started to accumulate acquaintances. One of them is the great Samuel Johnson; another is Marie Charpillon, a high-priced courtesan who becomes both his obsession and the cause of his eventual downfall. In an age when everyone is reinventing himself, Casanova attempts several guises--laborer, writer, country gentleman--in order to win his paramour, only in the end to come face to face with a darker self stripped of all artifice.

In tracing the course of his character's doomed love affair, Miller takes the reader on a graphic tour of 18th-century London from the glittering soirées of the well-to-do to the filthy flophouses of back street slum-dwellers. This might have been the Age of Enlightenment, but there are still many dark pits of misery and ignorance in this imagined universe. Miller tells his tale of obsession in cool prose that describes in intimate detail his characters' thoughts, and actions, the smells and tastes and textures they encounter, the humiliations and heartbreaks they suffer, yet from a certain detached distance. But in the world that his fictional Casanova occupies, love is a commodity and one with a high depreciation rate at that; in such a world, a little distance is singularly appropriate. --Alix Wilber

The Winter Soldiers

Andrew Miller

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Another View of the Civil War in Washington 4 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

A clever story about a plot to kidnap Lincoln during the Civil war. The book is well researched. I especially liked the description of Washington at that time. He basically developes two characters. One completely evil and one good. They clash and of course good overcomes evil. The plot is well developed but is thwarted by the good soldier from Media, Pa. (the author's home town). It is well constructed for a first time author. I couldn't put it down and am hoping for more of the same from this bright young man. Gae Leccese

Editorial Review:

When Abraham Lincoln wins reelection in the fall of 1864, it spells final doom for the Confederacy. Driven by desperation and by the odds against them, Southern leaders reach a decision that could bring them sudden, stunning victory: They will kidnap Lincoln from the very streets of Washington, whisk him to Richmond, and hold him for a king

Oxigeno/ Oxygen

Andrew Miller

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El Ocaso De UN Seductor (Narrativa)

Andrew Miller

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Casanova

Andrew Miller

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Editorial Review:

A little-known chapter of the legendary lover's story forms the foundation of this Andrew Miller's scintillating second novel. Giacomo Casanova arrives in England in the summer of 1763, at the age of thirty-eight, seeking a respite from his restless travels and liaisons. But the lure of company proves too hard to resist and the dazzlingly pretty face of young Marie Charpillon even harder. Casanova's pursuit of this elusive bewitcher drives him from exhilaration to despair and to attempt to reinvent himself in the roles of labourer, writer and country squire. Based on a little-known episode in Casanova's life, this is a scintillating, poignant, often comic portrait of a far more complex figure than legend suggests and of the decadent society in which he operated.