City of God
by E. L. Doctorow | Literature & Fiction | This book has not been rated.
ISBN: 0679447830 Global Overview for this book
ISBN: 0679447830 Global Overview for this book
This Book is Currently in the Wild!
2 journalers for this copy...
First published 2000.
E. L. Doctorow, an author well known for fusing history with social criticism in his fiction, once commented that “history is the present. That’s why every generation writes it anew.” City of God, like much of Doctorow’s work, explores universal themes on a grand scale within the small, very real world of contemporary New York City. The novel opens with a description of the Big Bang, thrusting the reader into a bewildering barrage of interlocking stories, letters, and events.
The novel centers on an appropriately religious crime — the stealing of a cross from St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church, an event that leads to a startling array of unconnected consequences. For the doubting Reverend Tom Pemberton, the crime serves as a catalyst for a religious, but also very human, experience as his attempt to get to the bottom of it leads him into an uneasy, then eventually loving relationship with a female rabbi, Sarah Blumenthal. The resulting clash of religion and sex is only one in a collage of divergent events and points of view as the novel speeds toward its thrilling conclusion.
Doctorow plays with the idea of the text as both literary and sacred, linear and disjointed, and as the characters try to find their way through a mystery that increasingly appears unsolvable, the city itself comes more and more to the forefront, mirroring the disjointed text of the narrative. City of God is an ambitious and sweeping book from a confident author at the height of his literary powers. The novel remains both a sensitive inquiry into the elusive meaning of the religious life in modern times, as well as a metafictional commentary on the dangerously textual nature of our own contemporary lives. — Anna Bogen in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die
E. L. Doctorow, an author well known for fusing history with social criticism in his fiction, once commented that “history is the present. That’s why every generation writes it anew.” City of God, like much of Doctorow’s work, explores universal themes on a grand scale within the small, very real world of contemporary New York City. The novel opens with a description of the Big Bang, thrusting the reader into a bewildering barrage of interlocking stories, letters, and events.
The novel centers on an appropriately religious crime — the stealing of a cross from St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church, an event that leads to a startling array of unconnected consequences. For the doubting Reverend Tom Pemberton, the crime serves as a catalyst for a religious, but also very human, experience as his attempt to get to the bottom of it leads him into an uneasy, then eventually loving relationship with a female rabbi, Sarah Blumenthal. The resulting clash of religion and sex is only one in a collage of divergent events and points of view as the novel speeds toward its thrilling conclusion.
Doctorow plays with the idea of the text as both literary and sacred, linear and disjointed, and as the characters try to find their way through a mystery that increasingly appears unsolvable, the city itself comes more and more to the forefront, mirroring the disjointed text of the narrative. City of God is an ambitious and sweeping book from a confident author at the height of his literary powers. The novel remains both a sensitive inquiry into the elusive meaning of the religious life in modern times, as well as a metafictional commentary on the dangerously textual nature of our own contemporary lives. — Anna Bogen in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die
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Journal Entry 3 by Vasha at Collegetown Bagels, 203 North Aurora St. in Ithaca, New York USA on Sunday, October 25, 2015
