Spirit versus Matter


Although the good old Gods were carried to the American continent by old time immigrants, they don’t seem to have many fans in nowadays America
Wisdom, knowledge, justice,... among other noble values they stand for, are now frail, when compared to entertainment, money, fame, etc, etc,... — material values that gave birth to a new group of divinities and archetypes related to those standards.

In this story the old Gods will fight the new ones, to recover their long lost power, in a Spirit versus Matter battle.
When I think about the intemporal confrontation between those two, since they are both human and essential, I bet on peace the moment they’ll finally balance each other.

"Read Gaiman!" they say. "I can't believe you've never read Gaiman! You have GOT TO read Gaiman!" "Gaiman is SUCH an important part of popular culture and one of the BEST contemporary writers! You HAVE TO READ GAIMAN!"

Well, I've read Gaiman now.

Hi Gaiman!
Bye Gaiman!


Let me quote:
"American Gods is Neil Gaiman's best and most ambitious novel yet, a scary, strange, and hallucinogenic road-trip story wrapped around a deep examination of the American spirit."

I agree with everything but the beginning and the end. It certainly was scary, strange and hallucinogenic.
None of it in a good way.

I like nothing about this book. Not liking it isn't very difficult, because I have honestly no idea what was going on. Not that I didn't get the actual story, it wasn't that hard, since Mr. Gaiman sure isn't the most demanding writer (that isn't meant as a criticism, it can be a good thing). But why the things that were going on, were going on, completely eluded me. And while I kept on reading and wondering, 'huh? why? What now?', in the end, it all came up to "Why should I care?"

This isn't my kind of book, mainly due to the subject and the characters. That's why I don't think anything Gaiman wrote would be my kind of book. It certainly isn't a book, or an author, you HAVE to read.

I guess this, like that strange car race video game and Star Trek, will be parts of popular culture that will have to live without me.

Terminada la relectura y preparada para la serie que necesito NOW NOW NOOOOW

Había leído este libro hace exactamente 14 años así que no me acordaba prácticamente de nada, pero recordaba que el principio era muy lento. Y es cierto. Mi yo 14 años más vieja sigue pensando que la primera parte del libro es quizás demasiado lenta... y Sombra: ACELGA DE LA VIDA. Pero a partir de la mitad es magia pura del señor Gaiman haciendo lo que mejor sabe hacer :)
#Laurateadoro

This is a tough review for me to write. I'm not exactly sure what it is about this book that I don't like. I'm not sure there even IS something I don't like. Since I don't want to just leave you all with the ever popular "I'm just not that into it", I will try to explain.

This book has all the elements of a book I would enjoy. The creepiness factor is up there, the writing is brilliant, the main character is a big lug I couldn't help but love. Also, I have always been fascinated by mythology, so that's a plus.

Shadow is our main character and he just got out of jail after doing his time of three years. Right before he is supposed to be released he is let out early, because his wife was killed, in apparently scandalous circumstances. The first 50ish pages were about the extent of where the book was interesting to me. Shadow meets Wednesday, and then the story turns into a bunch of mini stories and flashbacks, and I didn't enjoy most of them. Some were okay, but the majority just felt like annoying disruptions, and I felt myself thinking this is yet another longer book that could benefit from losing about 100 or so pages from the dragging middle. Shadow is paid by Wednesday to be an errand boy while he travels America trying to rally his troops in preparation for a war between The old Gods, and the new Gods (media and money) I guess it's my own fault. I couldn't really bring myself to care about this war between the new and old Gods, because the Gods of Media and Money? Not my Gods...

Books that are hyped up as much as this one leave me in a place where I tend to get disappointed, because it's so hard to live up to those expectations. Of course that's not the books fault, but I was just expecting to like this book much more than I did. I never felt engaged while reading this book, and that's the reason I couldn't rate this above three stars. I could appreciate the great writing and originality, however, so I couldn't give it below three stars.

Three stars it is folks, but as most of you know this book is loved by (almost) all, so of course I encourage everyone who is interested in this book already to read it, and form your own opinions. This book didn't do it for me, but I am definitely going to try some of Gaiman's other books and see if I have a better experience.

i'm a graduate student in theology, so how can i not love this book?
this book is one of the most creative descriptions of my own understanding of theology. gods do not exist on some eternal plane, but they rise and fall with the cultures and peoples who support and worship them. these gods have avatars in many different places--they are not a single entity but many that are called by the same name. mythologies can be more true than reality. and it's a good warning about how careful we should be when we try to make our gods into simple human form. this is a theme that fascinates me (coming as i do from the Christian tradition). you'll see a number of books about Christian fascism on my bookshelf, and there's a theme. i just finished The Kite Runner, so i'm also thinking about the Taliban's attempts to bring their understanding of god into concrete human reality. it gets messy, and i'm not convinced it's a good thing. yet in this book, Gaiman also provides us with gods in human form who are good, fun, and mostly ambiguous.
i guess for me, American Gods is a good cautionary tale, for me, about how gods lurk in our subconscious, and about our need to dethrone divine violence in favor of other models of sacredness. we need to be careful what and how and who we worship in the ways we choose to live.

"Many things prove to me that the gods take part in the affairs of man." - Herodotus

In Gaiman’s story, the converse is equally true: the very existence of the gods depends on the affairs of mankind, specifically, that people believe in them. Like mortals, they need to be loved.

Gods from cultures around the world travelled to the US in the minds of immigrants. The indigenous people already had their own gods, and now (2001) there are new gods as well: internet, capitalism, media etc. In a material, synaptic, digital world, the immaterial, synoptic, analog beings struggle to survive.

This fantastic concept is wrapped up in a disorienting road trip through the wonders of small town USA. Shadow, a young man recently released from prison, is taken on as driver and assistant for the mysterious Wednesday. They go to places on the cusp of the corporeal world, where they meet strange characters with stranger histories, as a growing sense of something ominous looms. Towards the end, there’s a series of forked paths, difficult choices: “Hard truths” or “fine lies”? Be wise, whole, or dead?

It blurs dreams and reality; gods and mortals; the living, the dead, and the inbetween. The main narrative is interspersed with chapters about historical settlers and the gods they brought. The second half is infused with ideas about identity, faith, mortality, and reality. But overall, I was slightly disappointed – though 3* isn’t bad.

Identity

“Nobody’s American… not originally.”
“Lady Liberty… like so many of the gods that Americans hold dear, a foreigner.”
“This is the only country in the world… that worries about what it is.”

Gaiman is a Brit who has lived in the US for many years. Britain is often portrayed as a nation of eccentrics, and Gaiman is drawn to the eccentricities of his new homeland. In an interview at the back, he says the chief difference between England and the US is that “England has history and America has geography”, but his story credits the US with both.

He fondly caricatures the bizarre and often anticlimactic roadside attractions, built at mystical sites where previous civilisations would have built stone circles or temples, and he paints the idyllic town of Lakeside with hues of Stepford and Twin Peaks. He points out that the signs for small towns always state the population and usually have an obscure claim to fame, often sport-related, such as the town’s Under 14s team was the third runner-up in the interstate Hundred-Yard Sprint.

Road Trip

A couple of weeks after reading this, we did an eclipse road trip in the US (which I blogged, with photos, in a GR review HERE). I looked out for strange signs: the printed (the smallest population I’ve seen previously is 79), the primordial, supernatural kind - and roadside attractions. On the crest of a hill in the Columbia River Gorge in Oregon, you can spot Stonehenge. It's a supposedly full-scale model (it's between half and 2/3), built as a memorial to US troops who died in WW1. The idea came from a man who visited the original at a time when it was thought to have been used for pagan human sacrifice. WW1 was a different, more worthy, type of human sacrifice.





https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maryhil...

Dead or Alive?

“Call no man happy until he’s dead.” - Herodotus
But as Shadow points out, that doesn't mean the dead are happy, but rather, that “you can’t judge the shape of someone’s life until it’s over and done”.

Gods abound, from a variety of times and places, including Norse, Ancient Egyptian, Hindu, central African, Asian, Irish, and central European. But the monotheistic God of the Abrahamic traditions does not feature. Not directly. There are strong parallels with the New Testament, though.

“There’s power in the sacrifice of a son.”
“Belief without blood only takes us so far… In the god business… it’s not the death that matters. It’s the opportunity for resurrection.”
And the goddess, Easter, has a central role.

“You’re not dead… but I’m not sure that you’re alive, either.”
“Now, dying on the tree, [x] was utterly alive.”

This idea of the living not being fully alive is also a recurring theme, but in a very different, non-spiritual sense, in The Book of Ebenezer Le Page, which I recently reviewed HERE.

“You people talk about the living and the dead as if they were mutually exclusive… As if you cannot have a river that is also a road, or a song that is also a color… Life and death are two sides of the same coin.”

Stories, Islands, and Pearls

“Lives are snowflakes - unique in detail, forming patterns we have seen before, but as like one another as peas in a pod”- which, of course, are not very alike when you really look.
“We need individual stories… the statistics become people.”

Like most writers of fantasy, Gaiman venerates the power of stories: ancient myths, but also the quotidian lives of ordinary folk. That’s the driving force here, and the life force for the gods. I guess it’s also the driving force of my reading, reviewing, and inner life.

It’s also why people respond to the recent tragic story of an individual like Charlie Gard, while ignoring larger scale tragedies, even if the latter are more solvable than the former. It’s not mere hypocrisy, but a specific sort of compassion fatigue, as Brian Resnick explains HERE. Anecdote isn’t evidence, but it is a powerful force.

But mostly, we prefer to protect ourselves from true but tragic stories. Gaiman claims Donne was wrong: we are islands, and therefore “we are insulated... from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories”. Thus “we build a shell around it like an oyster dealing with a painful particle of grit... This is how we walk and talk and function... immune to others' pain and loss.”

Perhaps this passage subconsciously prompted me to read Steinbeck’s The Pearl (which I reviewed HERE) immediately after this, though I only noticed the connection when writing this review - days after writing up The Pearl.

Personally, I think Donne and Gaiman both have pearls of truth: we are islands, but we have bridges and rescue boats at our disposal. We are connected if we care and dare to venture on the seas to those we love.

Quotes

* “To be a god... means you give up your mortal existence to become a meme: something that lives forever in people's minds... You barely have your own identity any more. Instead, you're a thousand aspects of what people need you to be... Nothing is fixed, nothing is stable.”

* “His smiles were strange things… They contained no shred of humor, no happiness, no mirth… Like he had learned to smile from a manual.”

* “Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.”

* “Chicago happened slowly, like a migraine.”

* “The moonlight drained colors into ghosts of themselves.”

* “Eyes, the dangerous blue of a sky when a storm is coming.”

* “American history… is fictional, a charcoal-sketched simplicity for the children, or the easily bored… The American colonies were was much a dumping ground as an escape.”

* “Like banana peel, only with bad taste and irony thrown in.” (A condom on the sidewalk.)

* “It’s easier to kill people when you’re dead yourself… You're Not prejudiced any more.”

* “Ice sheathed the winter-black bushes and trees as if they’d been insulated, made into dreams.”

* “It smelled of people who had gone away to live other lives, and of all they had eaten and dreamed.”

* “His anger seemed to have dissipated, or perhaps to have been invested for the future.”

* “There were stars overhead hanging like frozen spears of light, stabbing the night sky.”

* “Kansas was the cheerless gray of lonesome clouds, empty windows, and lost hearts.”

* “People gamble to lose money. It’s a sacrifice of sorts.” Coin tricks rely on cupidity and greed, thus, it’s harder to scam an honest man.

* “Since her death, Laura had not thought in metaphors; things were or they were not.”

* “All your questions can be answered, if that is what you want. But once you learn your answers you can never unlearn them.”

* “No longer scared of what tomorrow might bring because yesterday had brought it.”

* “Not only are there no happy endings… There aren’t even any endings.”


Flaws

This was my first encounter with a proper Gaiman novel. I loved his collaboration with Terry Pratchett, Good Omens (which I reviewed HERE), and his children’s novella, Coraline (which I reviewed HERE). In comparison, I felt this was lacking:

* It was too long before anything obviously significant happens, or there are meaty ideas. The first half was both vague and detailed, thus confusing. But after that, as the strands came together, I started to appreciate it more. It needed to be shorter and taughter, imo.
* Misdirection, especially coin tricks, is an entertaining constant. I thought following the coins would be key. They mattered, but the plot is disappointingly straightforward. There’s a huge cast, but few big surprises.
* A detailed confession being accidentally overheard near the end is an easy cliché.
* It's like Good Omens without the jokes.
* The whole premise is that the gods will perish unless people believe in them, but:
** If the gods travelled to the US, presumably versions stayed behind, so why is their survival in the US so crucial?
** Towards the end, there is a neat exception: “It doesn’t matter that you didn’t believe in us… We believed in you.”

With hindsight (and discussion in comments on other people's reviews), I realise I probably didn't pay enough attention to some of the historical chapters of people and gods coming to America, in part because I was frustrated with the vagueness of the first half. It's slightly like Atwood's The Blind Assassin (which I reviewed HERE): with that, I was too focused on the main narrative, so didn't give quite enough attention and admiration to the fictional story within the overall fiction.
.

Find all of my reviews at: http://52bookminimum.blogspot.com/

n  “Yes, it’s still God’s Own Country. The only question is, which gods?”n

All Shadow wanted to do upon his early release from prison was get home to his beloved wife and start his new life working for his best buddy. He didn’t plan for their untimely demise (with bestie's peen in wifey’s mouth, no less) in a gruesome automobile accident. Broke and alone, Shadow accepts a job offer from a mysterious, elderly stranger known as Mr. Wednesday. And then the tale begins.

Gak! I don’t even know where to start with this. I’ve had much success with Gaiman’s work in the past (so much so he’s made it to my pretty limited list of “Favorite Authors”), but I admit to actively avoiding this one for years – mainly due to the fact that just the idea of 652 pages makes my brain bleed unless I’m in the right mood. But then the library dangled free crap in front of me and added this to its recommendation list of books that might “Push Your Shelf” so I bit the bullet.

And what did I find? Well, for a good chunk of time I was reminded a bit of one of my old faves . . . .

n  n

After meeting Shadow and Wednesday, a road trip of epic proportions commenced which introduced a bevy of additional characters into the mix. Characters such as a six-and-a-half foot tall leprechaun, a talking raven who refused to say “nevermore,” three strange sisters as well as a pretty decent checkers player who got his kicks betting on the right to bash his opponent's brains out, pagans unfamiliar with the goddess Ēostre, Lucille Ball talking through the television set, bus riders and a hitchhiker, a very Andy Taylor type of constable and one dead wife who just couldn’t seem to go away. American Gods became reminiscent of Seinfeld in the way that it seemed like nothing was really happening, aside from the fact that the reader continually was receiving reminders that . . . .

n  n

Or something like that.

I was a little concerned that I wouldn’t be able to let go and enjoy this story, mainly because I didn’t vibe with Shadow right away due to his proclivity for coin tricks which had me picturing . . . .

n  n

Blech. I was also a tad apprehensive that I wouldn’t be able to stop comparing American Gods to one of my blasphemous favorites, and since this wasn’t happening on the Starz television program . . . .

n  n

My husband wasn’t interested in tuning in on my behalf and telling me whether or not this puppy squisher would be worth my time.

Since I read it in roughly 24 hours, I’d say it was a winner. Now I’m not going to go out on a limb and say this is a book for everyone because it most definitely isn’t. I’m not lying when I say nearly the entire book is all about the build-up as you follow that one main player . . . .

n  n

But Gaiman’s words are smooth as butter and he once again works his magic weaving an oh-so-elaborate spider web of characters. That’s how it earns 4 Stars.

I can’t say I’ll be reading the second in this series anytime in the near future, but I have a feeling Norse Mythology will happen sooner rather than later for one simple fact . . . .

n  n

Book #4 in the “Push Your Shelf” challenge. Thanks library for making me get off my ass and finally open this one!

n  n

Now for a bitch session. Last night I did, in fact, finish reading this book and used the app to post a “Currently Reading” update for my next selection. Then I started acquiring “likes” on a “Finished Reading” status I DID NOT post . . . .

n  n

Get your shit together, Goodreads. I have a hard enough time remember which books I need to review. I don’t need you mucking things up even worse for me!

Fantasy meets action packed thriller waltzes with Ancient and Modern mythology!

A masterpiece from my all time favorite author!
I loved the book! I loved the series that I highly recommend you to watch: for the love of Ian McShane who is the best choice to play mysterious Mr. Wednesday!

Giving my 5 gazillion stars and moving to the next masterpieces of the author!

Update: (17.11.2024 г.)

„— Въртележката не е, за да се возят на нея — най-малкото хора — обясни Уензди. — Тя е, за да ѝ се възхищават. Тук е, за да съществува.“


Завръщането към „Американски богове“ ми донесе още по-голямо удоволствие от първия прочит... Шеметното преплитане на митологии във въздействаща американска атмосфера и разнообразните препратки към други творби са се получили изключително успешно! Великолепният роман неслучайно е посветен и на Роджър Зелазни, от чиито книги определено се е вдъхновил Нийл Геймън. Мистичното пътешествие на Шадоу и Уензди дава на читателите си качествено литературно преживяване и силни философски размисли!



„— Именно — каза гласът на Уензди от мрака. — Беше нагласено. Но това е единствената игра, която се играе в града.“




Първоначално ревю:

„Американски богове“ е прекрасен фентъзи роман! Нийл Геймън е сътворил доста мрачна, но и завладяваща атмосфера, в която умело преплита много различни митологии...

Главен герой в книгата е Шадоу, който ми е много любим образ. На него му остават броени дни до излизането от затвора, когато разбира, че съпругата му е загинала в автомобилна катастрофа... След като е пуснат на свобода, Шадоу среща загадъчния Уензди, който скоро става негов работодател. Двамата тръгват на вълнуващо и опасно пътешествие из САЩ, като всъщност се забъркват в предстоящия грандиозен сблъсък между старите и нови богове в Америка...





„— Извинявайте. Американец ли сте?
— Да.
— Тогава честит Четвърти юли — каза сервитьорът. Изглеждаше доволен от себе си.
Шадоу не помнеше, че е Четвърти юли. Денят на независимостта. Да. Мисълта за независимост му харесваше. Остави на масата парите и бакшиша и излезе от ресторанта. Откъм Атлантическия океан подухваше хладен ветрец и Шадоу си закопча якето.
Седна на тревата по брега, загледа града, който го заобикаляше, и си помисли, че някой ден ще се наложи да се върне у дома. И някой ден ще се наложи да си направи дом, където да се връща. Запита се дали домът е нещо, което след известно време се случва с мястото, или е нещо, което накрая намираш, стига да си вървял достатъчно дълго, да си чакал и да си го искал силно.“

after a number of days on the #StruggleBus, i'm setting this aside.

for now, anyway.

it seems awfully preoccupied with man-eating vaginas and fatal, blowjob-related vehicular mishaps and post-mortem conjugal visitation.

by a lady zombie.

in other words, stuff het teenaged boys find super-exciting?

...not so much for an adult homosexual at war with a malignant narcissist with horrendous taste in gifs and/or his own soul-sucking holiday despair.

4.5 stars

(A-) 81% | Very Good
Notes: The concept's pretty brilliant, but the plot can be slow and plodding at times and the end doesn't live up to the build.