Creation by Gore Vidal
z’Germanland has a lot of religious holidays. That means they have a lot of extra days-off that coincide with their guaranteed government sponsored vacation days. A lot of these religious days are either on a Thursday or Monday. That means, Das Volk have long since figured out the use of “bridge days” to turn Good Friday and Easter Monday into a friggin’ vacation. If you add these off-days up and compare it to my grand (and so missed) united mistakes, it’s a wonder that anything gets done in Eurowasteland. (Who am I kidding — nothing does get done here!) And let’s not get into the idear of who can actually afford all these days off. That’s a whole ‘nother bucket of chow.
The worst thing about these days off is that other than bars and restaurants everything is closed. So either you can afford to go to another country that has things open or you fly to an island in the Med and shop there. For those of us stuck in the grey-scale atmosphere of z’Germanland, you can’t even wash your friggin’ car on account government regulation won’t let you. So. After all these years and wasted holidays (on account I couldn’t afford to go anywhere) I got to thinking. What good can I make of this? Long story short, read another book! And since religious holidays were so abundant, I decided to use those days to read religious literature. Seriously. I turned it into something like habit. And it worked out pretty well, I’d say. At the least, I got to read a lot.
Unfortunately these holidays are all Christian-based but I didn’t let that stop me. So. On Xmas I’d read the bible. On Easter I read the Koran. On Assumption day I read Lao Tse, etc. Of course, after a few years reading material started getting thin. So I resorted to reading aboutreligion. Here an example. One thing lead to another and you know the saying: seek and you will find.
I actually ordered this book from Amazon to read over Xmas 2010 but it arrived on Dec. 29. Nomatter. What a brilliant piece of writing. In fact, this is the fourth historical novel I’ve read by Gore Vidal and I’ve yet to be disappointed. In fact, this one is probably one of my favorites and is as great & good as Eco’s Baudolino (which I’ll eventually post something on). Here a bit on one of Vidal’s other historical works.
The thing to keep in mind about this book is it’s title. Hence I started writing this post motivated by the fact that I wanted to say something about how I got into reading religious literature – and subsequently got into reading about religion and that ultimately lead to reading this masterpiece. “Creation” is not about religion per say. It is really just a wonderfully written historical novel – that just happens to chronicle the beginnings of religion and hence politics. But the subtext of the entire book seems to me to be Vidal’s typical answer to the question eating so many ignorant and intellectually deprived American’ts who are all now suffering from religious indoctrination and dumb-down politics run-amok!
I think I understand how Vidal can get away with titling this book as he does. This book is about the creation of our world. In novel form Vidal takes the idear, NOT of the chemical reactions that ultimately created life (which American’t “believers” can never comprehend), but of the human-relations that have been passed down through centuries, and puts them in front of you in the form of an amazing journey through the eyes of the grandson of Zoroaster. Just the thought of this subject matter and how much must be in the mind of Gore Vidal to put it to print – amazes me. And so, juxtapose the title of this book against the batshit religious life-haters that have ruined American’t and corroded Christianity probably to the point of no return…
Oh well. I should leave well enough alone and just read this book again someday.
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Rant on.
-tgs-
worstwriter 