‘Circe’ stands up to those in power

Madeline Miller’s “Circe” is to Homer’s “Odyssey” as Jonathan and Lawrence Kasden’s “Solo: A Star Wars Story” is to George Lucas’ original “Star Wars” trilogy.

If you’re familiar with the canon, you know where these characters will end up (in Han Solo’s case, that means steering the Millennium Falcon with Luke Skywalker; while in Circe’s case, that means turning Odysseus’ men into pigs), but their respective origin story spinoffs answer questions you didn’t know you had — like where did the six-headed man-eating sea monster Scylla come from? Or how was the man-eating Minotaur of Crete born? Or why does Circe transform men into swine?

“Circe”
By Madeline MIller.
393 pp. Little, Brown and Company. $27.  
2018.

Miller’s “Circe” gives these myths new life, weaving them together and giving them context. Circe, the witch exiled to the island of Aeaea, was the daughter of the sun god Helios and nymph Perse. She was the niece of Prometheus, the Titan who stole the secret of fire from the gods and gave it to humanity.

She was the sister of Pasiphaë, the queen of Crete who gave birth to the Minotaur.

She was the aunt of Medea, who helped the hero Jason steal the golden fleece from her father and Circe’s brother Aeëtes.

Miller’s Circe was also an immortal goddess, a powerful master of transfiguration, who fell in love with mortal men and was uncomfortable with praise.

Odysseus, the Greek hero who made Circe famous, said he “never met a god who enjoyed their divinity less.”

But that’s what mortal men liked about her — that she was giving and approachable and motherly.

Battling with an internal monologue filled with doubt, guilt, fear, loneliness and low self-worth, Circe was a goddess mortal men took advantage of — who has her own #MeToo story.

But she doesn’t let it or her sins define her. She punishes and atones and persists. All the while, time stands still as we listen to her story with rapt attention.

Unlike Circe, those familiar with the Greek mythology are the ones with the gift of prophecy, knowing things before the goddess does.

Icarus will fly too close to the sun. Theseus will slay the Minotaur. Odysseus eventually goes home. And everyone dies — eventually.

But despite what the fates have foretold, we dare Circe to defy it, standing up to those in power and speaking the truth.

She doesn’t disappoint.

Donna Tartt’s ‘The Goldfinch’ is a work of art

Reading Donna Tartt’s novel “The Goldfinch” is to look through time, to glimpse a moment, memory and a noun — frozen and preserved in words or brushstrokes.

For Tartt’s 13-year-old protagonist Theo Decker, that’s the moment when his world blew up — when a bomb went off in the New York Metropolitan Museum and killed his mother.

“The Goldfinch”
By Donna Tartt.
864 pp. Hachette Book Group, Inc.  
2013.

Days and years and decades after, Decker would run through the moments in his mind: the last words she said to him (a history lesson about one of her favorite oil paintings: Carel Fabritius’ “The Goldfinch”), the last thing he ate with her (leftover Chinese takeout), the last Thanksgiving/Christmas/birthday/Mother’s Day/fill-in-the-blank he spent with her — playing the dangerous game of “what ifs” that might have prevented her death.

If Decker hadn’t been suspended from school that day, he and his mother might not have been together. If it hadn’t had rained, they might not have stopped in the Met. If they weren’t at the Met, she wouldn’t have been there when that bomb went off and she wouldn’t have died.

He wouldn’t have stolen that Fabritius painting of a goldfinch chained to its feeder from the museum.

He wouldn’t have walked away from the debris alone and in shock, assuming that she’d meet him back at their apartment.

He wouldn’t have called her cell over and over again, hitting voicemail ever time.

Child services wouldn’t have showed up at their New York apartment.

He wouldn’t have stayed with his best friend Andy Barbour or Barbour’s wealthy, attractive and distant Knickerbocker family. Or moved to Las Vegas with his absentee deadbeat alcoholic father and his father’s pill-popping girlfriend Xandra. He wouldn’t have met his friend Boris, or become a shoplifter, drug addict, thief, or bird chained to a million dollar painting that reminded him of this mother.

He wouldn’t have built his life around a self-destructive secret that could blow his life apart at any minute if discovered.

Or maybe Decker would have. Even if his mother had lived.

It’s impossible to know.

But Fabritius’ painting, Tartt’s book and other works of art serve a greater goal: to remind us to live.

“What teaches us to talk to ourselves is important: whatever teaches us to sing ourselves out of despair,” writes Tartt.

“The Goldfinch” does that, forcing us to think about our own mortality and the moments, memories and people who’ve shaped us.

“The Goldfinch” by Donna Tartt was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction in 2014.

 

The pieces to ‘Robin’ Williams life and death

Like most kids growing up on a diet of Disney movies, I first knew Robin Williams as the voice of the genie in “Aladdin.” Later, I grew to know him as John Keating in “Dead Poet Society,” Parry in “The Fisher King,” Adrian Cronauer in “Good Morning, Vietnam,” and Sean Maguire in “Good Will Hunting.”

After Williams died in August 2014, I binge-watched YouTube clips of Williams’ appearances on late night talk shows and watched “World’s Greatest Dad” on Netflix, searching the movie for clues to Williams’ depression. 

“Robin”
By Dave Itzkoff.
544 pp. Henry Holt & Co. $30. 
May 15, 2018.

Why did a man loved by so many kill himself? I wanted to know. Williams’ death reminded me of that of Richard Cory’s from Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poem (My “John Keating” had introduced me to this poem in my high school’s version of the “Dead Poet Society”).

We’ll never get the answer to this impossible question. But The New York Times‘ culture reporter Dave Itzkoff attempts to explain our “whys” in his biography “Robin.” A posthumous biopsy revealed that Williams had Lewy body dementia, a disease that “frequently presents with Parkinsonian motor symptoms and a constellations [sic] of neuropsychiatric manifestations, including depression and hallucination,” according to a surgical pathological report.

Itzkoff, who interviewed Williams previously (and remembers how Williams met Itzkoff at Williams’ favorite comic book store in New York City after the reporter expressed that he loved comics), is more interested in answering “who,” rather than “why.”

Who was this man that we loved?

He was a man we felt like we knew, who could make you laugh with his voices and characters, but “he was more like an illusionist, and his magic trick was making you see what he wanted to see — the act and not the artist delivering it,” writes Itzkoff.

Through extensive interviews with Williams’ family and friends including William’s son Zak Williams, ex-wife Valerie Velardi, half-brother McLaurin Smith-Williams, sister-in-law Frankie Williams, “Mork and Mindy” co-star Pam Dawber, comedian Dana Carvey, and “The Tonight Show” hosts Jay Leno and David Letterman, Itzkoff tries to chronologically piece together the mystery behind Williams’ public life and death — from his childhood playing with toy soldiers and moving from Michigan and Illinois to California to his marriages and rise in stand-up, television and film.

Williams emerges as a mostly tragic hero in Itzkoff’s book, one “addicted to laughter” and compared to “a giant puppy” — who was too eager to please and couldn’t say, “No,” even as it destroyed his career, health and relationships at times.

“If he could give you some of his time to help you enjoy your day or feel better about yourself, he would, and he gave pieces of himself to many people,” wrote Itzkoff.

But despite Williams’ kind and gregarious nature, Williams could also be an intensely private man that even those closest to him never fully knew.

“They believed there was some part of himself that he withheld from them; everyone got a piece of him and a fortunate few got quite a lot of him, but no one got all of him,” wrote Itzkoff.

Perhaps Itzkoff never gets to the bottom of who Williams was, but the book contains many pieces of Williams — pieces that you don’t want to end because once it does and you read through the last three chapters in tears, you feel like you just lost one of your favorite actors all over again.

Disclaimer: I received a free eARC of “Robin” by Dave Itzkoff from NetGalley in exchange for this honest review.