by Harold Auckridge ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 30, 2017
A lively and elaborate but deeply enigmatic religious allegory.
In this first installment of a Christian allegory, a husband and wife cope with their mercurial god.
Auckridge’s ambitious fiction debut opens with two seeds, the Mustard Seed and Barleycorn, buried in the ground. The Mustard Seed becomes bored so Barleycorn offers to tell a story to pass the time. That tale’s twists and turns constitute the rest of the author’s text (interrupted only momentarily, and charmingly, by Mustard Seed’s emotional outbursts, always quieted by Barleycorn). The story centers on three characters: a husband and wife, Eliakim and Anne, and their god, Luminous, and the plot, such as it is, starts with the trio in conflict. Eliakim and Anne are hiding because Luminous is determined to kill them in what seems to be an old cycle (“We beg and then you give,” Anne tells him. “You give and then you take it back”). Through a rapid-fire and seemingly random sequence of temporary deaths and transformations (into various animals and shapes as well as simple reincarnations of themselves), the trio moves forward from adventure to adventure, meeting an array of creatures and supernatural beings and experiencing one version of the world after another. Eventually time seems to pass, and among the additional characters who amble in and out of the story (including talking boulders and chains as well as Adam and Eve), is the son of Luminous. The prose throughout is wonderfully lean and fast-paced. But there’s only so much that briskly paced dialogue and exposition can do to alleviate the narrative burden that starts accumulating almost from the first page of this series opener. This is the besetting problem of religious allegories: they’re essentially coded texts and their decryption keys aren’t provided. The keys are found in separate texts, in this case the literature of Christianity. Readers extensively steeped in that canon will perhaps be able to make sense of the long story Barleycorn tells. Other readers will likely find the intricate tale almost completely impenetrable, with characters dying, transforming, and talking to each other in hints and allusions. For example, when late in the book Luminous attacks his son, he encases him in a talking iceberg. “I’ll melt you, my father,” the son says. The iceberg answers: “And I will rebuild myself again.” “I will be melting you forever,” the son responds. Here, as everywhere else in the novel, there’s the feeling that the characters are speaking in a secret language that readers either recognize or don’t. The characters themselves are never fleshed out, and the dialogue between them makes very little sense on its face but feels as if it’s trembling with deep meaning for those who know the encryption code. Since Anne, Eliakim, and Luminous bear the main weight of the tale, and all three are mostly incomprehensible and unchanging as well as immortal, they possess no elements of drama and therefore give uninitiated readers very little to grab onto.
A lively and elaborate but deeply enigmatic religious allegory.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9993105-0-2
Page Count: 382
Publisher: L & H Production
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Albert Camus ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 26, 1955
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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by Stephen Batchelor ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 18, 2020
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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