"God is nowhere God is now here

Pregnant and secretly married, Cheryl Anway scribbles her last will and testament - and eerie premonition - on a aschool binder before a rampaging trio of misfit classmates gun her down in a high-school cafeteria..."

I got this book from a friend who just visited from the UK. He said not to read it when travelling alone, I'll see if I ever find such a time.

Zayah brought this book to a bc meeting, and I took it. I haven't read anything by Coupland before, but this looks interesting.

The book is reserved for aava.

Oh well. Not a bad book, but not exceptionally good either. I liked Coupland's style and found the book easy to read, but I didn't quite get the point of the story. It's about religion and believing (in God or other things), and about losing a loved one. The story has four parts, each told by a different character, but now when I think about it, I don't think there was much difference between the voices of the characters - they all sounded quite the same, which is not a good thing.

If there's a deeper meaning in this story, I guess I just didn't get it. An OK read, but not much more.

(And I can't see why this shouldn't be read when travelling alone. I didn't find the story too scary or otherwise upsetting, but maybe it's just me.)

I got this book yesterday in out BC-meeting, thank you Tintti. I have read Coupland before and even if his works are not always great they are certainly very interesting. He also shares my passion with The Smiths. That´s always a good thing!

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edit 17.4.2006:

I was watching Michael Moore´s documentary film Bowling for Columbine last week and started the book right after it. I don´t know if I really expected to get some answers or what but in the end all I could feel was dissappontement. Ok, the first two parts were good but then the last two parts just were not.

I think Coupland is really good at describing the dynamics of the family and that was also evident in this book too. I´m not sure what he intended, but I would have wanted to read more of what really happened that triggered all these events.But maybe that´s just the point: there can never be any explanation good enough, at least not one I could accept.Now I´m drifting far away.

Anyway, I have to say that I do like the effortless style that Coupland has. It served well in this thought provoking book. He sort of distances you from the the horrific reality so at least you are able ro read about it.

thanks zayah for sharing this one!

editing in June 2008: I'm taking this book with me to our BC Summer meeting in Helsinki.I'm hoping that the book will get there a new reader.

From the 3rd all-Finland summer get-together at Suomenlinna, Helsinki. Thanks!

I've read this a few years back and do recall it was not the best of Coupland... Will give it a new try, anyway :-)

Huh, minulla ei ollut aavistustakaan että tämä makaa journaloimattomana hyllyssäni! Luen nyt uudestaan Maailman maat -haasteen Kanada-kirjana. Coupland kuului joskus 1990-luvun lopulla suosikkikirjailijoihini. Olen lukenut tänä vuonna couplandejani uudelleen enkä oikein näe niissä samaa hohtoa kuin ennen. Tai näen nyt erilaisen hohdon, mikä ei tietenkään vähennä hänen arvoaan ajankuvaajana.

Joka tapauksessa: nyt lukuun.

Not to mention the zeitgeist, I feel compelled somehow by the effortless beauty Coupland churns at us in every one of his books. I don't know why I'd labeled Hey Nostradamus as slightly second-rate: I do think it flows better almost than any other. But it's a book for a younger audience, or for an audience seeking something against which to mirror their own past youth maybe, or an audience who has in fact stayed young inwardly. I've never praised Coupland for his existential flair: the "floatiness" and thematic ambiguity (for the lack of a better word) mentioned by some other journalers above really are there for the zeitgeist only, not intended as a revelation of any kind. What Coupland does in every one of his books is show us snapshots of the world, our context, the context of the generation x I guess, nothing more. He doesn't show where it comes from or where it is heading. All true to the ideology : for us, alienation and detachment were the keys. Now a couple of decades have passed, and gen x has been replaced by gen y and gen z and gen god-knows-what, each in its turn in popular consciousness, and I don't know if Coupland appeals or is comprehensible anymore to readers outside this particular generation label.

OK, and this is a book about religious fanaticism and terrorism, ultimately of disillusionment with humanity, which makes it a bit special and a bit heavier and less appealing in underlying substance. I guess in order to map out gen x you have to seek its marginal, too: on the fringe of it, a spiritual viewpoint that transcends the horizon of the present moment, an attitude completely clashing with the materialism of the 1980s. School massacres did turn out to be a phenomenon that has marked the era and the subsequent eras in mainstream consciousness, though, and using the perspective of a naïvely religious 17-year-old, and then the perspectives of adults stuck in the past ten or so years later, is one way of tackling the issue and perhaps of attempting to show us the two sides of the coin. Or maybe just reminding us that ideology exists and continues to shape us.

This also got me thinking about those gen labels. The specific markings and makings are always easy to spot on other people and other eras, say, on someone who grew up in the 1950s or the 1960s. But when it comes down to us, we're not sure how to step outside of ourselves and whatever ideologies constitute us. And it's difficult really to see any watersheds of where we stopped being gen-x'ers if we ever did, or will. When did/will we see the restrictions of the specific outlook on life that our generation shaped for ourselves, or our era shaped for us?

I'm reading this for the Countries of the World challenge http://www.bookcrossing.com/forum/30/541674/. Hey Nostradamus is my Canada book, but since for me it's very universal and pan-Western and generation-al in character, I'd rather not concentrate on the place but the place in time. Besides, the all-pervasive pop youth culture and cable and video and MTV made North America feel very much a home for young Finns in the 1980s, or at least so we thought, so much so that for us it started to signify Us and not the Other. Of course, our perception was tinted and narrow and 100% shaped by television sitcoms and music videos, but it felt our cultural home nevertheless, and it still does: in our ability to identify with and feel a common ground in a story like this, even if the narrators' specific viewpoints do not match ours . (Taking the thought further, it'd be interesting to see where our perceived "identification" fails us, to be able to spot the breaking points where reality differs from our trans-Atlantic interpretations. And, more specifically, why we like identifying the way we do, and what it tells about us when we feel it's unpleasant to be reminded of the possible existence of a radical difference in interpretation. But then, of course, we wouldn't necessarily be talking Case Coupland any longer.)

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So I didn't particularly enjoy the contents of the book. But I surely appreciate the writer's skill and the topics he draws from. (I've always been a sucker for ideologies and zeitgeist personal and public—maybe you can tell ;-p)

I have cherished a Coupland collection in my bookshelf, but I think I could just as well part with this one, having pretty much written it out of my system in this journal entry. (And that just tells you something of the book's finiteness: if it was anything "more" I would have more to say about it, or at least I could see myself as having something more to say about it in the future.) So I'm taking this to whatever bookcrossers' meetup I happen to be attending next. Or maybe I'll find a friend to give this to before a meetup is scheduled.

Thank you so much for this book, CL! I'm intrigued.