Slow River

Amazon.com

Slow River won both the Nebula Award and the Lambda Literary Award for author Nicola Griffith. The book's near-future setting and devices place it firmly on the science fiction shelves, and the characters' matter-of-fact sexuality further label it as lesbian SF. But make no mistake, Slow River is no subgenre throwaway. Griffith's skill at weaving temporal threads through the plot bring protagonist Lore van de Oest to tragic life, and you will genuinely care about her in the end.

Born into a bioengineering family made wealthy by cleaning up after humanity, Lore leads a life of privilege and power. Riches don't bring happiness, though, and the van de Oest family hides its share of dark secrets. Lore is kidnapped, but escapes from her captors when she realizes her family isn't going to pay the ransom. Naked, alone, and wounded, she is saved by the brutally street-smart Spanner, who teaches Lore to survive by exploiting the Net (and human) weaknesses. To learn to trust, though, Lore must face her demons, one by one, until she can begin again.

Griffith's biotech-science details are accurate, and she fits them smoothly into the story in the manner of a cyberpunk master. This novel's real strength is its characters, though. The van de Oest family, Spanner, even characters who appear only briefly, are all distinct and consistent--not to mention very human. Lore herself seems so personal that Griffith's note about the story's disturbing aspects not being autobiographical was probably wise. Slow River is more than good enough to transcend genre and appeal to both queer SF readers and a more broad audience looking for an excellent character-driven SF story. --Therese Littleton

Book Description

She awoke in an alley to the splash of rain. She was naked, a foot-long gash in her back was still bleeding, and her identity implant was gone. Lore Van Oesterling had been the daughter of one of the world's most powerful families...and now she was nobody, and she had to hide.

Then out of the rain walked Spanner, predator and thief, who took her in, cared for her wound, and taught her how to reinvent herself again and again. No one could find Lore now: not the police, not her family, and not the kidnappers who had left her in that alley to die. She had escaped...but the cost of her newfound freedom was crime and deception, and she paid it over and over again, until she had become someone she loathed.

Lore had a choice: She could stay in the shadows, stay with Spanner...and risk losing herself forever. Or she could leave Spanner and find herself again by becoming someone else: stealing the identity implant of a dead woman, taking over her life, and creating a new future.

But to start again, Lore required Spanner's talents--Spanner, who needed her and hated her, and who always had a price. And even as Lore agreed to play Spanner's game one final time, she found that there was still the price of being a Van Oesterling to be paid. Only by confronting her family, her past, and her own demons could Lore meld together who she had once been, who she had become, and the person she intended to be...

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Winner of the 1996 Nebula Award for Best Novel

Nicola Griffith, winner of the Tiptree Award and the Lambda Award for her widely acclaimed first novel Ammonite, turns her attentions nearer to the present in Slow River, the dark and intensely involving story of a young woman's struggle for survival and independence on the gritty underside of a near-future Europe.

Then out of the rain walked Spanner, predator and thief, who took her in, cared for her wound, and taught her how to reinvent herself again and again. No one could find Lore now: not the police, not her family, and not the kidnappers who had left her in that alley to die. She had escaped... but the cost of her newfound freedom was crime and deception, and she paid it over and over again, until she had become someone she loathed.

Lore had a choice: She could stay in the shadows, stay with Spanner... and risk losing herself forever. Or she could leave Spanner and find herself again by becoming someone else: stealing the identity implant of a dead woman, taking over her life, and creating a new future.

But to start again, Lore required Spanner's talents -- Spanner, who needed her and hated her, and who always had a price. And even as Lore agreed to play Spanner's game one final time, she found that there was still the price of being a Van Oesterling to be paid. Only by confronting her family, her past, and her own demons could Lore meld together who she had once been, who she had become, and the person she intended to be...

"A dark and intensely involving story... In Slow River, Griffith -- with language brilliant and clear as sun-glittered water -- delineates a woman's struggle to remain herself and to stay alive."
   THE PHOENIX GAZETTE

"Griffith's heroine, Lore van de Oest, is a futuristic lesbian Patty Hearst. Kidnapped from her wealthy family shortly before her eighteenth birthday, Lore is abused, degraded, and ultimately left half dead on the streets of an unnamed European city. Salvation comes in the form of Spanner, a charismatic outlaw, who both seduces and manipulates Lore.... This is a character who always knows who she is. And that puts Lore, along with her creator, among the most intriguing women in sci-fi."
   DENEUVE

"With her first novel Ammonite... Griffith revealed herself to be fluent in presenting realistic science and its implications, capable of cinematic clarity in her prose, insightful with emotions and character.... Replicating many of her debut's themes and strengths, Slow River nonetheless expands into new territory."
   THE WASHINGTON POST

"With its persuasive characters trying to form identities in an unstable society, its midnight streets and shabby apartments, and its vast industrial engines, Slow River is a powerful prose poem on issues that are already with us.... It's a worthy and radically different successor to its author's acclaimed debut."
   LOCUS

Customer Reviews:

A wonderful near-future story.......2007-02-09

This is a novel about Lore, the daughter of a family that has become spectacularly rich patenting genetically engineered microbes that are used to reduce pollution, who has been kidnapped and chooses not to go back to her family, because she believes she may have been molested by her father.

Without her famous name or any real identity, Lore is left scraping out a way to survive among the outcasts and impoverished of her society. Lore is a lesbian, as are an improbable number of the women she encounters along the way, and there is a good deal of sex in this book, but this story is really about class identity more than gender identity.

Lore first spend some years with Spanner, a small time grifter who helps her when she is injured. She later uses the expert skills in chemistry, microbiology, and waste disposal she was taught as a prospective leader in the family business to get a grunt position in a sewage treatment facility. The new job leaves Lore torn between her awareness that the poor management of the plant is a potential threat to both employees and the public, and her attempts to maintain her identity as an uneducated employee who wouldn't understand the potential dangers.

One very important thing: Griffith is unusually gifted, and the book is beautifully written. The story on its own would have been a good book, but it's the quality of Griffith's prose that really raises it to the level of outstanding.

The rich and the poor.......2007-01-07

Slow River is a masterful exploration of the difference between the rich and the poor. The language is beautiful, the scenery is immersive, tangible and fragrant, and the characters are painted fully into life. I must compliment the author on her language skill, a quality so very rare in modern literature. Although there are quite a few lesbians in the novel, this is mostly irrelevant to the storyline, despite what other reviewers seem to think. The novel is not about sex, it's about character and self-discovery. It's about the contrast between patrician Lore and the poor people around her, like Spanner and Magyar; the contrast between their character and view of life, between their occupations and their goals, and between their moral codes. It's about why and how the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor, and why Lore couldn't stay in the gutter where she was cast, while Spanner couldn't leave it. If you like books that make you think, you should like this one.

Disappointing.......2007-01-05

Slow River is set maybe 100 years in the future - everyone has an identity chip, the environment is shot, genetics can be manipulated and apparently most of the population looks and acts like new wave punk rockers. So far, it sounds pretty good, right? The themes of this story are compelling - human connection, desperation, identity lost and found - but none of these are given enough depth to fulfill their potential.

The concept of a young girl kidnapped, tortured in front of millions, left for dying in an alley - her family uncaring, harboring damning family secrets we are anxious to discover is a great one. But we never really believe that she would be so guilty from killing her KIDNAPPER that she would hide from the law. We never really believe that she would be so horrified by these secrets that she would give up BILLIONS for a life of prostitution and drug abuse. The revenge her psychotic ex takes on her is no revenge at all - not at all worthy of what we have been led to expect of the character. The author literally seems to wimp out at the end, cobbling together a conspiracy of idiotic conception. Even the gruesome childhood memory that could have been a real dramatic climax instead leads us weakly to a too slick happy-ending with none of the power it could have.

Slow River leaves the impression that the author got lazy - unwilling to give the extra 100 pages these themes really needed. Or that large sections of the book was cut in editing - but why they wouldn't cut the endless descriptions of water treatment techniques instead is baffling.

What could have been a hard-hitting, excellent piece of fiction told from the view of a species almost NEVER found in sci-fi - the young, independent lesbian - unfortunately disappoints. I want so much for Griffith to re-write this novel, giving it the attention it deserves.

Ugh! Boring!.......2006-11-30

I read so many good things but even if I had not, I would have been disappointed...it is slow, the characters are cold, there is no excitement in the first 100 pages (I did not finish- I had to grit my teeth to get that far)...it was dull dull dull.

Slow Reading.......2005-12-09

If you've come to site to read about the 1996 Nebula Award Winner, don't be fooled, this is not science fiction no matter how the publisher may have tried to hype that on the book jacket. Not only should you ignore the fact that the SFWA gave this novel an award that used to mean best science fiction of the year, you should now question the worth of Nebula Award winners of any year after and including 1987. Science fiction has gone through subgenres. In the first half of the 20th century, scifi was mostly a pulp magazine short story genre. The 50's saw the rise of the preeminent old guard of science fiction, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, with space empires, future histories, etc. This continued with two subdivisions, hard scifi and soft scifi, with hard science fiction writing more about the science (what would it be like in a spacecraft near an astronomical body with an intense gravitation field like Larry Niven's Neutron Star) and soft science fiction talked more about humanist, psychological effects of science. The 70's also saw the rise of some low level homosexuality written in the background of stories. Frederik Pohl's 1977 Gateway, winner of both the Nebula and Hugo awards, was a landmark novel in that it brought together these divisions in one novel. The early 80's then saw a dramatic shift with the rise of cyberpunk. However all of these elements had something related to science fiction; the spirit of their subgenres had science in it. However, in 1987, feminism became the fad of the SFWA and no less than four subpar novels were awarded the Nebula award for four straight years. (Haha, I can hear lesbians laughing at `straight'.) For the year of 1996, feminism wasn't enough, they had to award the Nebula to a novel on lesbianism. Now, if you *wanted* to read a book on lesbianism, well then there you are, and this book won some Lambda award, *but* if you were looking to read science fiction and, OK, will accept lesbianism as a subtheme, then this book is NOT for you. This book is lesbianism through and through. To say this novel even has a veneer of science fiction is giving it a lot of credit. And if you don't already know, to heterosexual males, true lesbianism is not of any interest whatsoever. Yeah, so you've seen some titillating girl or girl porno photos somewhere, or those teenage girls on the cover of the t.A.T.u. cd that claim to be lesbian sure look hot. It's fake, they're not lesbian, it's all a business, to sell whatever it is that's wanted to sell, those girls are at most bisexual, but probably not even that. Real lesbians are not titillating to males and they don't care whatsoever that they aren't. And if they act like they are, it because they want to jerk your chain because they despise you so much. They even despise heterosexual women. I read an article years back that went on and on deriding Alanis Morissette, why?... because she was lamenting about a relationship with a man. Personally, and I've spoken with other men who thought so too, I think that Alanis Morissette almost single handedly helped improved male-female relationships. If you were a guy and left a woman, or the woman left you, all of her female associates will gather around her and you are just scum and if they felt anything you sure wouldn't know it. But Alanis sang with so much passion about the pain that you could understand that women were indeed human beings. All the lesbianism and feminism isn't going to do that. It's going to blame you. Lesbians even have a problem with heterosexual feminists! The author herself has complained that only lesbianism represents true feminism. Do I find this interesting? Actually I do. Like many science fiction readers I'm open to many different subcultures. Do I hold anything against lesbians (no pun intended)? No of course not. It's their life to live as they choose. Should this book have won the Lambda award for best lesbian novel of the year? That's dependent upon the organization on how they rate it's worth amongst other works of it's genre, in this case lesbianism. Did I find the articles on Alanis Morissette worth reading? Sure, they were relatively short and explained a lot about their mindset. I also found other articles written by them interesting like how their clothing fashion is cutting edge, and how heterosexual women will eventually emulate their fashion sense. HOWEVER, did I find taking the time in my life, in my career, amongst all the myriad of other tasks I want/need to do (and this is the entire *point* of this review) to slog through this 300+ page book worth it?: NO.

You've probably read the plot elsewhere. Some female protagonist finds herself on the street, she gets taken under the wing of some other female character, she has her first lesbian experience, blah, blah, blah. Did I say this book is boring too? It is. It's also not very original in its basic sense. And what is Slow River supposed to mean: the flow of vaginal fluids? How witty.

Why did the SFWA (the Speculative Fiction Writers of America) award the Nebula to this book? Who knows: guilt over awards to past science fiction writers like Robert Heinlein?, a collusion amongst all the female writers within the SFWA?, internal politicking? Like many things that seems bizarre to an outside viewer, usually politics are involved. And giving the Nebula award to this book reeks of the stench of politics.

I've seen from another reviewer, "be warned", written Feb 4, 2003, that gave this novel 1 star, received only 3 out of 27 useful review notations; way more feedback than most other reviews. So what does that mean, that 24 lesbians have commented on that review? This review is specifically for science fiction readers. Personally I should never have to be writing this review because I should never have read this book. But this novel was awarded the Nebula award in 1996 and I was under the idiotic notion that the Nebula was awarded to the BEST science fiction novel of the year, and so I read this book, and thus a review under that context is justified. If one cannot accept criticism or an opinion differing from their own, well what does that say,... what does that say about the tolerance of lesbianism.

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Hypnotic
really really good
to disjointed
Don't Fish In This River
Dark dark mystery from The Great War

By a Slow River
Philippe Claudel
Manufacturer: Knopf
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 1400042801
Release Date: 2006-06-13

Book Description

As the First World War rages on, the daily life of a small town near the front is hardly disturbed by the report of artillery fire and the parade of wounded in its streets. But within the space of a year, this illusion of ordinary days is shattered by the deaths of three innocents—a charming schoolmistress from “the north,” who captured every male heart only to take her own life without apparent reason; an angelic eight-year-old girl, who is strangled, her body abandoned by the canal; and the cherished wife of the local policeman, who dies in labor while her husband is hunting the little girl’s murderer.

Twenty years on, the policeman still struggles to make sense of these mysteries that both torment and sustain him. In the pages of his notebooks he continually—desperately, obsessively—summons up the past and its ghosts. But excavating the town’s secret history will bring neither peace to him nor justice to the wicked. And as his solitary detective work continues on these long-closed cases, we come to see that his efforts can lead only to an unimaginable widening of the tragedy.

In the policeman’s simple, plangent voice--full of unflinching scrutiny and the compassion of weary experience--Philippe Claudel gives us a tale of galvanizing suspense and an indelible meditation on morality.

Customer Reviews:

Hypnotic.......2007-01-10

I can't imagine anyone wanting to skim a book this short and this hypnotic. The translation from French is so bright, beautiful and compelling it seems impossible it could have been written in anything but English. Though drawn on by the voice, the deepening mystery and the devastating portrayal of a world at war, I often stopped to not just re-read gorgeous, striking, mordant passages, but to read them aloud to my spouse, who later read the book and loved it, too. The French have a genius for writing short, dark mysteries (think Thierry Jonquet) that continues to astound me, given all the years I was bombarded as a mystery reviewer by big fat empty American thrillers (Deaver, Baldacci) that were apparently written under the assumption that "nothing succeeds like excess." I'd give this book six stars if an extra one were available.

really really good.......2006-12-09

With all due respect to reviewer Crabtree's passionate and admittedly coherent repudiation of this novel, I couldn't disagree with him more. I liked this novel a lot, in fact enormously. It builds momentum, and I found myself extremely anxious to move ahead towards its conclusion. The narrative, it's true, isn't told in a perfectly linear way; as a result, it takes some mild extra attention to retain the overarching thread, but I say "mild" and that's all it is: Claudell's narrative structure is plenty easy enough to follow. Meanwhile, the writing is beautiful; there were many places where I stopped to reread sentences or paragraphs, for the sheer arresting beauty of the language. I might have hoped for something different in the ending, but, when I thought about it, the ending was truer than what I might have wanted. I recommend this book very highly, and wish more of the author's work was translated into English. If his other novels, any of them, are close to this good, I'll be very glad to have the chance, someday, to read them.

to disjointed.......2006-10-14

it could have been a 5 star but the writing was to disjointed , maybe because of the translation...

Don't Fish In This River.......2006-10-10

When during the reading of a novel, for which I paid good money, I feel frustrated, and then when at the completion of the very last page and word I feel annoyed, I think it proper to a least go to the trouble to post a single star alert amongst the glowing four star reviews of my fellow readers. Qui bono? Certainly not me, but possible a perspective reader. So here goes.

Writers market their work, publishers hype them and distribute them. Professional critics write reviews and here is the suspect rub:
these people who use terms that induce me to purchase the book like; heart-gripping, melancholy beauty, the author carves each scene with lexical precision, a page-turning whodunit with a subtle aftertaste, to mention just a few. Give me a break! I suspect these are the folks who somehow qui bono for those glowing reviews. This novel is a sniveling story of a small town in France that takes place, in part, during WWI. Sniveling because the narrator constantly reminds us that the entire population are, at best, something akin to draft dodgers in one way or another. Men and boys are dying in the trenches just miles away, while village life is better than ever from some minor and trivial war profiteering. The town is peopled by persons with flaws, probably no better or worse that one would encounter anywhere. These characters enter stage right through flashbacks galore, maybe not such a good literary technique when used as excessively as the author does. The first person story narrator, an ineffective policeman, describes cardboard characters, stereotypes that, at least for me, were difficult to care about one way or the other: A fat pompous bureaucratic judge, a nasty jailer, an aristocratic and somnolent, unfeeling prosecutor, the obligatory village idiot mayor, and an even more canned village prostitute with a heart and thighs of gold, etc.. All of whom the author tries his best to tell you, rather than show you, that you should care about. The narrative thread, when you can detect it, seems to be that when someone dies who is loved, some people can never get over their passing, as in decades and decades and decades of moping. There never was a credible case made by the author for any of this undying devotion to these shallow and poorly delineated dead people.

The title in French is "Gray Souls" and that clearly and aptly defines the essence of the novel, but the English title "By A Slow River" is not far off the mark either. The last lazy writing technique, in my opinion, was the cheaply concocted revelations that allowed the author an exit to thankfully close the doors to a poorly constructed, weakly plotted, and clueless narration, of almost two-hundred pages.

The writing was translated from French by Hoyt Rogers. Under his conversions I found the narrator joltingly breaking character with his use of some of the more American Anglo Saxon expletives; they just didn't fit into a French village dialogue during the early nineteen hundreds. Other than that I guess he did a credible job.

Dark dark mystery from The Great War.......2006-09-27

Summary no spoilers:

The main part of this story takes place during WW1, in a village in France very close to the trenches where the horrors of the war are being played out.

As thousands of young men die in that conflict, this tale focuses on the murder of a 10 year old girl, the apparent suicide of a beautiful school teacher, and the death in childbirth of the wife of the narrator, a policemen investigating the murder.

The story ends with the policeman's findings, years later,

As much as I thought this was a touching and profound story, with a *devastating* ending, and despite the fact this is a relatively short book, I often found it tedious at times. I often found myself tempted to skim.

Part of this problem may be due to the fact this is a translation from French, but I just think the authors particular style and manner of writing was just not my cuppa.

Still, recommended. Especially for those interesting in the time period around The Great War, and for those who like their mysteries dark and foreboding.

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By a Slow River: A Novel
Philippe Claudel
Manufacturer: Anchor
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Literary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

French | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 1400078016
Release Date: 2007-06-12

Book Description

A bestseller in France and winner of the Prix Renaudot, By a Slow River is a mesmerizing and atmospheric tale of three mysterious deaths in an oddly isolated French village during World War I.

The placid daily life of a small town near the front seems impervious to the nearby pounding of artillery fire and the parade of wounded strangers passing through its streets. But the illusion of calm is soon shattered by the deaths of three innocents–the charming new schoolmistress who captures every male heart only to kill herself; an angelic ten-year-old girl who is found strangled; and a local policeman’s cherished wife, who dies alone in labor while her husband is hunting the murderer. Twenty years later, the policeman still struggles to make sense of these tragedies, a struggle that both torments and sustains him. But excavating the town's secret history will bring neither peace to him nor justice to the wicked.

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Inspired and masterful

A Cracked River (Slow Dancer Poetry)
Norbert Hirschhorn
Manufacturer: Slow Dancer Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Customer Reviews:

Inspired and masterful.......2001-04-06

Norbert Hirschhorn's manipulation of language and its rythms is masterful. He weaves images of great delicacy and poignancy and scans the world and people around him with a piercing yet empathetic look. Hirschhorn is an erudite poet, his work rich with allusion: Echoes of Yeats, Hopkins, Graves, Frost, and Eliot tinge his work, but the product is always unique and original. He writes in a variety of styles, refusing to impose a pre-ordained form on his poems. Each is a fresh concoction, each has a life of its own, each is inspired by the moment and then crafted into a graceful and complex artifact.He is at his best when he combines wit and pathos, as in the poem entitled "New Old Uncle Blues" and "Elegy." Hirschhorn is a poet in the Gravesian sense: He is true to his muse and abandons himself to her enticements by awakening, battling and finally exorcising his demons in a complex dance of worship and wonderment, control and abandon. Mishka Mojabber Mourani

IN BRITAIN - January Jan 1984: Something to Shout About; Star Quality; Slow Boat to Wales; Of Knights and Men - John Steinbeck; Rivers of Britain: The Orwell; Animal Farm; On the Town: Haddington; Brick Dinosaurs

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IN BRITAIN - January Jan 1984: Something to Shout About; Star Quality; Slow Boat to Wales; Of Knights and Men - John Steinbeck; Rivers of Britain: The Orwell; Animal Farm; On the Town: Haddington; Brick Dinosaurs
Bryn (editor) (Mary Bryant; Carol Wright; Philip Llewellin; W. JU. Weatherby; David Mlinaric; Michael Watkins; Brian O'Hanlon; Leslie Gardiner; Mark Wallington) Frank
Manufacturer: The British Tourist Authority
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000MACRB8

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Audio Mystery Tour

Janet Cardiff : A Large Slow River
Marnie Fleming
Manufacturer: Oakville Galleries
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: 0921027974

Book Description

To the delight of museum-goers around the world the internationally acclaimed audio-artist creates "sound fictions", carefully orchestrated experiences combining music, ambient sounds and narrative. Donning headphones and following a pre-ordained path, the listener becomes a participant in a shared exploration of sensory perceptions. For the current project, her site is a large garden on Lake Ontario. Conversations and events are strung together in such a way as to suggest a mystery. The gentle park becomes a place with the potential for tragedy. An organ grinder, opera singers, buzzing bullets and helicopters punctuate our reactions. The experience is all-encompassing due to a 32-track recording of binaural sound with omni-directional microphones, thereby producing a three-dimensional sound that simulates human hearing.

In her essay, Fleming talks about Cardiff's desire to go beyond the traditional barriers imposed by art. By developing a dramatic relationship between sound and vision, she is able to communicate more directly with an audience than other mediums allow. Fleming also discusses how Cardiff's work has grown out of earlier sound/vision experiments by artists like John Cage, Laurie Anderson and Derek Jarman. Includes an audio CD.

Customer Reviews:

Audio Mystery Tour.......2006-04-02

Cardiff is a grant-supported Canadian artist who does sound installations featuring soundwalks. This beautifully-produced book (50 pages!) + CD recorded in binaural sound features a fictional mystery inside her narrated walking tour of a lake in Ontario.

Part soundscape, part fiction, part picturebook -- at only 18 minutes it's quite short, but very immersive.

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Slow River
Henry Myers
Manufacturer: BMI
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Sheet music
ASIN: B000J4FZ48

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Slow River 1ST Edition
Nicola Griffith
Manufacturer: DEL REY BOOKS
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000PVK8XI

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Slow River Tent Card
NICOLA GRIFFITH
Manufacturer: Del Rey
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: 0345396847
Release Date: 1995-07-04

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A slow, soft river

A slow, soft river;: Seven stories
Lawrence Dorr
Manufacturer: Eerdmans
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding
ASIN: 0802814980

Customer Reviews:

A slow, soft river.......2003-09-05

Each story is a moving chronicle of a personal journey through a difficult time in life, told with great facility, imagery and emotion. They are encouraging to the reader that they too, may find grace and redemption in their life.

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Full of brilliant jems

Hard to read

Will Make You Want To Do Further Reading

The wisdom of prose and poetry

An Interesting Noodle

Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?
Harold Bloom
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

How to Read and Why

Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds

Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

ASIN: B000I2J25Y

Book Description

In one of his most inspiring books yet, Harold Bloom, our preeminent literary critic, takes the reader from the Bible through the twentieth century, searching for the ways literature can inform lives. Through comparisons of the Book of Job and Ecclesiastes, Plato and Homer, Johnson and Goethe, Cervantes and Shakespeare, Montaigne and Bacon, Emerson and Nietzsche, Freud and Proust, and finally discussions of the Gospel of Thomas and St. Augustine, Bloom distills the various-and even contrary-forms of wisdom that have shaped our thinking.

Customer Reviews:

Full of brilliant jems.......2007-09-11

Reading Bloom is an enjoyable experience even though he sometimes repeats himself and he has a tendency to make very declarative judgements with inadequate support. His knowledge is overwhelming but I have learned to take Bloom with a grain of salt, meaning that he often opens new doors for me but he also reveals doors that I am convinced I do not wish to open. This review of his book will focus primarily on the bits and pieces of his thought and observations that I find personally interesting and unique since I read Bloom, not to master Western literature, but to seek new ideas freshly presented.

Bloom indicates that the Book of Job is the greatest aesthetic triumph in the Hebrew Bible and that neither JOb or King Lear gives a justified God, in fact both works demonstrate that we have no language appropriate for confrontation with the Divine. He quotes 'Behold the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding.' We learn that 'ekklesiastes' means congregation in Hebrew and are treated to an analysis of this superb section of the Bible that gives us '...vanity of vanities; all is vanity...One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth for ever. The sun also ariseth...there is no new thing under the sun...For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.' Bloom also explores the beautiful first eight verse of Chapter 3 which starts "To every thing there is a season..." Bloom explores Plato and Homer and observes that 'our civilization is still split between a Hellenic cognition and aesthetic and a Hebrew morality and religion.' Bloom comments on The Republic with 'Plato accurately argues that most citizens never grow up and therefore need to be fed benign fictions.' In the debate of philosophy (Plato) versus poetry (Homer) sides with poetry with the wonderful observation 'Socrates, in Plato, formulates ideas of order; the Illiad, like Shakespeare, knows that a violent disorder is a great order.' Bloom quotes at length from Gregory Vlastos 'the varieties of mysticism are legion. It can be wholly this-worldly, as in Zen.' and then later with 'What is excellence for? I can only reply, 'For Humanity.' Plato would protest that my question is senseless;excellence, he would say, eternally complete in the world of From, is not for anything or anyone; it simply is, and its imperative to us is only the imperious love its being evokes in any soul capable of knowing it.' Bloom quotes Pascal 'you would not seek me if you had not already found me.'

Bloom includes wonderful quotations such as Wallace Steven's "But a poet consideres the vices of his contempraries as the temporary dress in which his creations must be arrayed, and which cover without concealing the eternal proportions of their beauty." Simone Weil's observation "Throughout twenty centuries of Christianity, the Romans and the Hebrews have been admired, read, imitated, both in deed and word; their masterpieceshave yielded an appropriate quotation eery time anybody had a crime he wanted to justify." In his chapter on Plato and Homer Bloom gives us "Defensive warfare is no more an ideal (for many of us) than is aggression, but in the Illiad both are very near the highest good, which is victory. What other ultimate value is imaginable in a world where the ordinary reality is batle?" I found interesting his interpretation of the Illiad, "I find it difficult to read the Illiad as 'the tragedy of Hector', as Redfield and others do. Hector is stripped of tragic dignity, indeed very nearly of all dignity, before he dies. The epic is the tragedy of Achilles, ironically enough, because he retains the foremost place, yet cannot overcome the bitterness of his sense of his own mortality. To be only half a god appears to be Homer's implicity defintion of what makes a hero tragic. But his is not tragedy in the biblical sense, where the dilemma of Abraham arguing with Yahweh on the road to Sodom, or of Jacob wrestling with the angel of death, is the need to act as if one were everything in oneself while knowing also that, compared with Yahweh, one is nothing in oneself." Bloom ends his comparison of Plato and Homer with the wise "power must come at the expense of someone else's pain."

Bloom loves both Shakespeare and Cervantes, who coincidentally died almost simultaneously, and considers them the central Western authors. Bloom quotes Nabokov's assessment :"Both parts of Don Quixote form a veritable encyclopedia of cruelty. From that viewpoint it is one of the most bitter and barbarous books ever penned. And its cruelty is artistic." Bloom states that Cervantes plays upon the human need to withstand suffering. In his support for reading Bloom says that the better we read, the mjore solitary we become. This is based on his concept that the deepest motives for reading is the quest for wisdom. Despite Blooms high regard for Shakespeare he will point out that others such as Samuel Johnson would say that Shakespere sacrifices virtue to convenience, and is so much more careful to please than instruct, that he seems to write without any moral purpose. Bloom gives us the great quote from King Lear "When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools." Nietzsche praised Macbeth for its absence of moral jdments, an observation that Bloom thought accurate throughout Shakespeare. Bloom astutely says that rather than discoursing on good and evil, Shakespeare is more intested in why we cannot sustain our own freedom. This same concept is quoted by Goethe who rameredk that Shakespere's plays where the 'characteristic quality of our being, our presumed free will, collides withthe inevitable course of the whole." Goethe's astute analysis continues with 'in ancient literature the conflict is between moral obligation and its fulfillment while in modern literature the agon is between desire and fulfillment. Goethe surmised that Shakespeare fused th ancient with the modern and thus obligation and desire try to counterbalance. I loved Wallace Steven's concept of finding an idea of order in a great disorder - which I originally understood to ready 'an idea of order is a great disorder' with Salem, Robespierre, Hitler, and Pol Pot coming to mind.

Bloom compares the thoughts of Montaigne and Francis Bacon. Montaigne comments on Plato's Socrates "It is he who brought human wisdom back down from heaven, where she was wasting her time, and restored her to man, with whom lies her most proper and laborious and useful business." Montaigne's advice "Have you been able to think out and manage your own life? You have done the greatest task of all...To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranqulity in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately. All other things, ruling, hoarding, building, are only little appendages and props, at most...There is nothing so beautiful and legitimate as to play the an well and properly, no knowledge so hard to acquire as the knowledge of how to live life well and naturally; and the most barbarous of our maladies is to despise our being."

Hard to read.......2007-07-05

without a great background of classical reading, this was the most difficult of his books to read

Will Make You Want To Do Further Reading.......2007-01-23

I found this book to very stimulating; the examples Bloom used were well-chosen and explained well. Bloom is an authoritative writer, that while times off-putting, is one of the most interesting literary critics I've come across. I think this book is great for readers who may not have a deep personal catalogue of "classic" books that they have read to check out. It will enlighten to some works you may or may not have really heard of; and help you decide if you want to tackle any of them.

As a book of philosophy in itself, it's not that stellar since Bloom is simply giving an anecdote to much larger works. The only other gripe I would make is unescapable feeling that you get that Bloom feels Western society, particularly their literary and intellectual society, is without question superior to others. But, if you have read anything else of Bloom, you will come into reading this book with that expectation so it shouldn't bother you too greatly. I recommend this one.

The wisdom of prose and poetry.......2006-08-08

Harold Bloom, the Yale Shakespeare and Western Cannon guru, has produce another book of erudition. In Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?, Bloom explores the wisdom literature of the Bible, Plato, Homer, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Francis Bacon, Goethe, Emerson, Neitzsche, Freud, and Proust. Bloom argues that these selected authors are not to be understood within their historical context, but rather understood for the universality of their insight into the human sprit and condition. It is their very universality that makes their work "wisdom writing" as opposed to merely "period pieces." This is antagonistic to the wisdom theory emerging from the Yale psychology department headed by Sternberg who suggests that context, both cultural and historical, is what helps provide prospective. And it is prospective which, in turn, produces wisdom. A very different approach.

Bloom also fiercely contends that it is poetry and prose that teach us wisdom much more than philosophizing and goes into a quite lengthy explanation as to why Homer can teach us more than Plato.

One insight of this book that I hope to retain is the importance of wisdom literature in cultivating our own wisdom. Through reading we recognize our own thoughts articulated through another's words. The search for wisdom is a quest for knowledge and understanding that should begin by conversing with the ancients and the greats through their progeny - wisdom literature.

An Interesting Noodle.......2006-04-28

Harold Bloom, Yale University Don, paddles into religious-philosophy waters. This book starts off soundly enough, but like many Stephen King novels, desintergrates into ravenous particles by the end. His lip service to Augustine borders on insulting and is almost forgiven by his Gospel of Thomas section.

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Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?

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2004 PB in gift condition.

Where Shall Wisdom be Found?: Calvin's Exegesis of Job from Medieval and Modern Perspectives

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Where Shall Wisdom be Found?: Calvin's Exegesis of Job from Medieval and Modern Perspectives
Susan E. Schreiner
Manufacturer: University Of Chicago Press
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Theater of His Glory: Nature & the Natural Order in the Thought of John Calvin

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Through countless retellings, from the Talmud to Archibald MacLeish and since, the story of Job has become a fixture in the cultural imagination of the West. In this study, Susan E. Schreiner analyzes interpretations of the Book of Job by Gregory the Great, Maimonides, Thomas Aquinas, and particularly John Calvin. Reading Calvin's interpretation of Job against the background of his most important medieval predecessors, Schreiner shows how central Job is to Calvin's struggles with issues of creation, the problem of evil, the meaning of history, and the doctrine of providence.

For Calvin and his predecessors, Schreiner argues, the concept of intellectual perception is the key to an understanding of Job. The texts she examines constantly raise questions about the human capacity for knowledge: What can the sufferer who stands within history perceive about the self, God, and reality? Can humans truly perceive the workings of providence in their personal lives or in the tumult of history? Are evil and injustice a reality that we must confront before finding wisdom?

In her final chapter, Schreiner turns to the wide array of twentieth-century interpretations of Job, including modern biblical commentaries, the work of Carl Jung, and literary transfigurations by Wells, MacLeish, Wiesel, and Kafka. The result is a compelling demonstration of how the history of exegesis can yield vital insights for contemporary culture.

Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?: Wisdom In The Bible, The Church And The Contemporary World (Academic Paperback)

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Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?: Wisdom In The Bible, The Church And The Contemporary World (Academic Paperback)

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'Where shall wisdom be found?'.(Book Review) : An article from: Catholic Insight

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'Where shall wisdom be found?'.(Book Review) : An article from: Catholic Insight
Ian Hunter
Manufacturer: Thomson Gale
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This digital document is an article from Catholic Insight, published by Thomson Gale on June 1, 2005. The length of the article is 685 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

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Title: 'Where shall wisdom be found?'.(Book Review)
Author: Ian Hunter
Publication: Catholic Insight (Magazine/Journal)
Date: June 1, 2005
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 13 Issue: 6 Page: 7(1)

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Where shall wisdom be found?: A popular setting of the story of the Hebrew wisdom seekers

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Where shall wisdom be found?: A popular setting of the story of the Hebrew wisdom seekers
W Harvey-Jellie
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