A provocative new picture of the “historical” Jesus.
Longley’s historical novel is the second volume of an extrapolation on the origins of Christianity.
The German critic Erich Auerbach famously writes that the Bible is “fraught with background”—it withholds more truths than it reveals. As much can be said of the gospels, and a variety of modern writers, from Norman Mailer to Robert Graves to José Saramago, have composed fictions intended to fill the gaps in the biography of Jesus. Longley joins their ranks with his Magdala Trilogy, a multivolume set designed to deliver a literary portrait of first-century Palestine made clearer in the light of new historical, textual and archaeological research. This book focuses on the adulthood and ministry of Jesus—here identified in the Aramaic as Joshua—and seeks to develop a believable profile of the man who started Christianity. In Longley’s version, Joshua shares the stage with Maria (Mary Magdalene), a Jewish prostitute and Jesus’ intimate, and Linus, a Roman soldier and the father of Maria’s son Marcus. Longley’s panoramic view of Joshua’s life benefits from the findings of the Jesus Seminar, a group of 20th-century scholars devoted to developing a more accurate understanding of the “historical Jesus”—the man apart from the myth. As such, Joshua is more man than God, though he remains holy. He is married and widowed; he loves, and has sex with, Maria; his miracles—and the miracles that seem to follow him—are more figurative than literal. But despite these elaborations, alterations and fabrications, Joshua remains a blessed figure and a hero. Longley’s volume is scrupulously researched but endlessly creative. Further, its historical Maria and its fictional Linus are worthy foils to the still-strong Joshua. (By book’s end, Maria is the novel’s real heroine.) And the author’s prose is lush and confident, though he writes with a sense of humility appropriate to one recalibrating scripture.
A provocative new picture of the “historical” Jesus.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2009
ISBN: 978-1440178900
Page Count: 467
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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