DSL August Read: Karen's Pick
I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story by Glen Duncan(find in a library)
It's on.
posted by mary_m @ 5:47 PM
Wednesday, August 09, 2006
I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story by Glen Duncan(find in a library)
It's on.
23 Comments:
Not done reading yet. Just got it but this is good. Am swapping between it and finishing "The Lawless Roads" by Graham Greene. John
Oooh, Graham Greene. I've been meaning to check him out.
I'm partway through, too, and have tracked down a copy of Herzog to read next. So, I'll finish a Saul Bellow book yet, John.
Maybe a Graham Greene will be my pick. We'll have to wait and see..... John
Oh, and I, Lucifer is foul and perfect. It really reminds me of Martin Amis at his best, or something like it. I love it so far.
Has anyone else noticed that Declan Gunn is just Glenn Duncan rearranged? Glad y'all seem to like it. I'll admit when I first started reading, my knee jerk reaction was 'this is such blasephmy.' I guess I just haven't been out of the South long enough. However, the book is really entertaining. For those that care, I LOVE Denver so far. I think I've found my place.
Yeah. I noticed the anagram. I initially thought it was gloriously blasphemous, too, but at the same time very reminescent of C.S. Lewis's "The Screwtape Letters" (anybody read it?). I'm not sure there's not a morality tale buried in I, Lucifer, though.Remember William Blake's thing, "What you call evil I call good and what you call good I call evil"? Either way, it's a great pick Karen. I haven't picked up a book I was this excited to read in a long time. I keep quoting little passages to people ("eve, that little minx", "Sympathy For The Devil" was Keith and Mick all on their own, etc...). It's great. John
I just started it last night and love it. It would make a great companion piece to "The Bible According to Mark Twain." The thing about them both is that they're both sort of blasphemous, except also, I think, could be read as ultimately upholding a general idea of God and goodness and morality and such. Blasphemous on the outside, with a nice moral nougatty center, if you will.
Has the September book been chosen yet? Mary said something about Herzog, but I didn't know if that was the next pick, or just a random comment.
Just a random comment. The next book pick is John's, and I trust it will be wicked cool.
Funny you said that, Gwen, b/c when I was describing I, Lucifer to a friend in the studio he said "is that the Mark Twain one"? I think it just may have that nougatty center as well. C.S. Lewis was, unfortunately, all nougat (except maybe "The Great Divorce" and some stuff after his wife died. Kinda like a deep fried twinkie. You can have too much good. ( I may want to recount the deep fried twinkie thing, though. they are actually pretty awesome.) John
I hadn't really thought about the unreliable narrator thing before, but it's a good point. I mean, we could read this whole book and then in the last couple of pages find out he was lying all along or something.
And Decan Glenn is dreadfully pathetic.
I've read quite a few books told from the devil's point of view, and most of them are fairly cheeky and clever, and Lucifer is, in the end, a fairly sympathetic chap (look at me... I read one British novel, and suddenly I'm saying 'cheeky' and 'chap').
The thing I liked about this book was that Lucifer, in addition to being cheeky and clever, also did evil things. At first, this was a little off-putting. My thought was, Crap... why can't this be like Good Omens where the Devil's minions run around designing particularly annoying freeways instead of plotting rapes and murders and genocide?
But then I got to thinking about it, and yeah, the Devil SHOULD be evil. It kind of goes along with the moral core y'all were discussing. Hedonism aside, Duncan really gets into the nitty gritty of good and evil, and in places, was surprisingly traditional in the beliefs he expressed.
One last thought... the scene where Violet buys the keychain from the deaf woman and then is rude to her was fantastic and heartbreaking. It perfectly captured that moment when you catch yourself doing or thinking something awful and know, "My god, I'm a monster." My goodness... the whole scene was awful enough, and then she looks down and sees that the keychain says "Learn my language so we can be friends."
Gah.
So, I did some research (playing on Google) on Glen Duncan and apparently he's Catholic. Kinda devout, too. Interesting.
I don't know that I think he's not really the devil. I think he probably is. The anagram seems like a way for the writer to exorcise his own demons and play one at the same time. I feel for the actual Glen Duncan in this sense. Maybe that's a portion of the joke, though? I dunno. I agree with Mary's comment about those "moments of evil", like when Violet gets the keychain. Harriet's "evil" seems so benign in comparison to the everyday evil of that one little act. It's an odd juxtaposition.
I was really struck by the part where he's talking about when he finally discovers free will in heaven, and then says [paraphrasing here] "Admit it...you'd have left too." I mean, it's a fascinating contradiction--if you believe in an omnipotent and omniscient God, then you believe he created us with free will and intellectual curiosity, which implies we're supposed to use them, and that he knew exactly what was going to happen as a result, except then we're punished for doing exactly what he knew all along we were going to do. WTF?
Lucifer's comment that we would have left too makes me think of the super-devout families I've known, and how BORING they were. It's just so dreadfully *dull* to be around people being so damn GOOD all the time. People are so much more interesting when there's some irreverence and willingness to be a little (or a lot) naughty now and again.
So Lucifer's right...I WOULD have left.
I was thinking last night that Glen Duncan reminds me a bit of Kevin Smith...someone who puts out ostensibly blasphemous, anti-religious works that the average Catholic (or other Christian) would probably find absolutely horrific, but who is, nonetheless, still a practicing Catholic and sees no reason why questioning church teachings and being irreverent means you can't also believe in morality and God and so on. As several of us commented on earlier, the book (and Smith's movie "Dogma") has this outer anti-religious shell, but if you can look beyond that, I think it's actually a fascinating way to get people to engage with theological and spiritual questions that, in the end, are not necessarily corrosive to belief.
These are great posts. Faith itself is an impossibility. To have faith necessarily means to be in doubt. That's why, as a kid, I always liked the apostle Thomas so much. He fought himself and struggled with his own belief, even while following Jesus and the others. Paul wrote that "Faith without works is dead". Fundamentalists love to quote Paul even more so than Jesus, it seems. Maybe Paul should "Faith without doubt is dead". The Basque Catholic existintialist Miquel de Unamuno (who was always on the verge of excommunication) wrote that “Life is doubt, And faith without doubt is nothing but death”. Paul would have done better to use Unamuno's words, in my opinion. That "thorn in his side"? He shoulda just come out of the closet. Take note that the only New Testament references to homosexuality as sin come directly from Paul. I had to add that for no reason at all. Oh well.
I totally get what you're saying, Karen. I put my grandma in that category (though I've never heard the phrase "crunchy Christian"--this gave me an image of hippy Jesus-lovers eating granola while reading the Bible; I assume that's not what you mean?). My grandma is deeply religious in a way that leaves no room for doubt, but as far as I can tell, also leaves no room for introspection and thinking about what might be in the *spirit* of Jesus...You know, really into the smiting of enemies and all, but not so much into the forgiveness and compassion part. Among other things, I'm often confused by how many Christians back in Oklahoma were much more about the Old than the New Testament. I mean, in that case, if the Old Testament is still the most important source, then is there not really an Atonement after all? And isn't the main point of being Christian that you believe in the Atonement and therefore that the Old Testament/laws of the Jews is superseded by the ability to find forgiveness through the Atonement?
Anyway, I finished the book this morning...fantastic ending! I can't imagine an ending I would find more satisfying and not feel like I'd been cheated somehow. Great pick, Karen!
I agree with Dusty. I think it's easier for writers to take a cynical "what a bunch of crap" attitude towards faith because a) they'll likely find an audience for that and b) it lets you off the hook insofar as you don't have to think too much about how complex faith is. It's easier to say it's stupid than to entertain the possibility that it might be true.
Because doing that is really hard. Einstein said that God doesn't play dice with the universe, but you've got to admit, he does seem to do an awful lot of things on a mean-spirited whim. Look at Job and Judas and the Israelites wandering around in the desert. In the book, even the decision to give Lucifer a second chance seems motivated by... well, God only knows what.
One thing I really liked about Dogma is that, in the final scenes, it manages to reconcile the idea of a loving God with a just, vengeful God. In I, Lucifer, God never seemed to me anything but a cosmically detached egomaniac. Of course, consider who's telling the story...
But still, did we get any hints of a loving or just God in the book?
Okay, I'm late to the game here, but I had to wait till Mary was done with it.
This may just be the goober professor-in-waiting talking, but I see a really keen Sociology of Religion/Cultural Studies/English course taking shape here. You start off with Paradise Lost and the Confessions of St. Augustine for some background, and then hit the Screwtape Letters, Good Omens, this book, Preacher, the issue of Hellblazer where Lucifer explains why he got kicked out of Heaven, Dogma, etc. Call it, I don't know, Sympathy for the Devil: Fallen Protagonists, Religious Satire, and R-Rated Apologetics.
I'd teach that course.
Anways, other thoughts: though I enjoyed this book quite a bit, I think I prefer Good Omens, though it is admittedly more slight in some ways. Though I think G. O. falters at the end whereas in comparison I thought the finale of I, Lucifer was excellent. Reminded me of the end of a Sam Peckinpah movie in tone, if not in the specifics.
As for some of the points raised by all y'all:
a) Evidence that God is loving, but also so far beyond human comprehension to be (from our point of view) a lunatic. The way the ethereal and the material realms were so seperate kind of sealed this deal for me - just absolutely different frames of reference for angelic, mortal, and divine mindsets. That, and the bit where Lucifer remarks that it's kind of a head-trip being everything that is.
b) my favorite temptation/nasty thing he did: this would be stealing the purse of the woman that helped him after he got beaten. Nice.
c) Are we to believe he's nuts or really the Devil? I'd say really the devil, and here's why: what with the clarivoyance that we see in interactions with other characters, the massive amounts of cash that get deposited into his bank account by his demon buddy, and the melting frying pans when there are too many of the host in a cramped flat. . . we see lots of evidence in the reactions of the outside world and other people to our "hero" that certain plot points that matter a lot for the rest of the plot did happen, especially the cash. If he's not the devil, that means that barely a single thing happened in the book at all.
I agree with Brady on the nastiest, meanest thing he did--that was, to me, the worst (in a good way) moment in the book, where you suddenly realize what he's done and how totally HORRID it is.
And I'm with Mary about the way God is portrayed in the book. God just comes off as somehow indifferent, dopey, and supremely self-centered, all at the same time. I didn't get the sense he created humans or angels or anything b/c he LOVED them. But I did enjoy the sort of existentialist ponderings on how if you're Everything, then really it's much like being Nothing, since you have nothing to distinguish yourself from. So deep, man.
While I'm thinking of it, another book along these lines is Robert Heinlein's Job: A Comedy of Justice. In it, a man from a world where America has gone hardcore Evangelical is catapulted through a variety of alternate Earths, most of which are a little more relaxed in matters of morals than his. This is happening because it's the End Times (tm), naturally.
Heinlein got a little nutty towards the end, but this one's a pretty good read, if you can get past the way every single character has the same "voice," which is also the same voice as the narrator and the characters in most of his books.
(If you choose to read it, be warned: the gender/sexual politics lean towards the macho midwestern free love libertarianism of his later stuff, especially when Our Hero ends up in Hell, which is pretty much the Chicken Ranch with demon hooker secretaries. This becomes kind of a bummer.)
Still, it's worth it for when a bureacratic snafu prevents our hero from attaining sainthood.
Almost.
It think the ending with Raphael was an intersting way to nullify the devil while keeping the devil himself. I once heard a priest say "we're required to believe in hell. We're not required to believe anyone's there." I like the sentiment but I hate that post-modernity has tried so hard to nice up everything. I did like how Glen Duncan essentially made his existential argument for free-will and the existence of hell, the devil, etc., but I wish evil was still evil. I do not like Dave Eggers or David Foster Wallae. That is all for now. I also don't like Don Dellilo. That's it. I promise. I'm tired. We just got back from lower alabama. The beach was nice, Pottsy.
In case anyone's interested, I found an interesting-looking book in the library yesterday called Our Lady of the Lost and Found. It's about a woman who find the Virgin Mary in her living room. Not an image of the V.M. in her couch cushions, but the actual woman herself. V.M. explains that she's very tired, and needs to crash somewhere for a week, and the woman puts her up.
Don't know if it's any good yet, but thought that, given our recent reading, I'd mention it.
Just a question: So what do y'all think Duncan's "message" in this book was? What's his perception of God, etc.? I don't mean to be like the English teacher looking for the moral, but still I'm curious. John
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