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Publisher:
Perennial |
Release
Date: September 2, 2003 |
ISBN:
0-06-055812-1 |
Awards:
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Format
Reviewed: Trade PB |
Buy
it at Amazon |
Read
an Excerpt |
Genre:
Fiction and Literature - Fantasy/Horror |
Reviewed:
2003 |
Reviewer:
Kristin Johnson |
Reviewer
Notes: Reviewer Kristin Johnson is the author of Christmas
Cookies Are For Giving, co-written with Mimi Cummins. Her
third book, Ordinary Miracles: My Incredible Spiritual, Artistic
and Scientific Journey, co-written with Sir Rupert A.L.
Perrin, M.D., will be published in 2004. |
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American
Gods
By Neil
Gaiman
Anyone
who is familiar with Neil Gaiman's ultra-literate Sandman series
won't be surprised at the Beat-Poet-ish (Allen Ginsberg, perhaps)
riffs, and the Biblical sweep of the Bhagavad-Gita soulful-meditation-on-truth
Wagner-like operatic arias of prose in American Gods.
To sum
up the plot in two paltry paragraphs does the book an injustice.
It is an apocalyptic fantasy pitting the old gods against the gods
of the Digital Age. It is a tale of redemption (or is it?) for the
Everyman hero, who is a "Shawshank Redemption" type of
guy named Shadow, as well as for America. It takes us through many
mythologies from Native American (Don't know Wisakedjak? You will!),
Norse (The villain, Mr. Wednesday, is purportedly Wotan, as in Odin,
a favorite in Gaiman's Sandman odysseys), Ancient Egyptian (Shadow
gets his heart weighed against a feather), Hindi (Kali, the Indian
Destroyer Goddess, is called Mama-ji), Eastern European, and modern
pseudo-mythologies such as media, Internet and television (especially
comic and chilling is a scene in which Lucy Ricardo tries to seduce
Shadow from the television with the unlikely line "You ever
wanted to see Lucy's tits?"). There's a minor plot stolen,
with reverence, from Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery,"
a few "Men In Black" figures running around, and a tip
of a black silk hat to "The Sixth Sense" when Shadow keeps
seeing his dead wife Laura, who is one of the strongest female characters,
dead or alive, you'll meet.
And
although you may be wondering at page 400 where it's going, just
let yourself get lost in Gaiman's playful, emotional prose, say
at around page 394 during the WAITING FOR GODOT type monologue delivered
by Samantha Black Crow:
"I can believe things that
are true and I can believe things that aren't true and I can believe
things where nobody knows if they're true or not
Listen-I
believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite,
that the world is run by secret banking cartels
"
This
is just a taste of eternity, of divinity, of hell, of heaven, of
agony and ecstasy and human fallibility, all possessed by Neil Gaiman's
American Gods.
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