A potentially controversial reimagining of history and religion.
Religion, history and autobiography intertwine in Anonymous’ (Holy Ghost, 2009, etc.) latest novel.
This book’s central premise mixes fact with fiction, and Eastern spirituality with Western religious tradition, in an intriguing retelling of historical events. The story centers on the mysterious figure of Cristo, whose journey spans three separate lifetimes across multiple centuries. Readers first see him as a wayward youth living in the ancient Middle East, after having spurned his family and faith in search of a higher spiritual purpose. His travels bring him to India, where he first practices Hinduism and later experiences a profound vision while reflecting on a statue of Siddhartha. Inspired by his vision, he returns to his home, dedicated to creating a new religion, and becomes the figure known as Jesus Christ. Following his crucifixion, Cristo is reborn as Christopher Columbus and trades his spiritual ambitions for those of wealth and power in the New World. The semiautobiographical final passages place a version of the author in the role of Cristo, with his novels precipitating a worldwide revolution. The book reinterprets the characters of Christ and Columbus as complicated, ambitious figures, in ways that stray from traditional depictions. This unorthodoxy also shows in the author’s narrative style, which eschews dialogue and traditional structure, allowing him to ruminate at length on the novel’s recurring themes. These passages offer some evocative language (“It seems that history in the Bible and in the textbooks crowned the glory of the lord with the black powder and sharp saber”), but also confuse the narrative, and often read like conspiracy theories. References to the New World Order, the 9/11 attacks, and “how twenty million people could control the world’s banking with usury and control the media world” may offend readers as much as they confuse them, and make the novel’s second half difficult to reconcile with the first.
A potentially controversial reimagining of history and religion.Pub Date: April 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-1628579772
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Strategic Book Publishing & Rights Agency, LLC
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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