Bathing the Lion

Bathing the Lion

Hardcover
1.01

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Beschreibung

In Jonathan Carroll's surreal masterpiece, Bathing the Lion, five people who live in the same New England town go to sleep one night and all share the same hyper-realistic dream. Some of these people know each other; some don't.
When they wake the next day all of them know what has happened. All five were at one time "mechanics," a kind of cosmic repairman whose job is to keep order in the universe and clean up the messes made both by sentient beings and the utterly fearsome yet inevitable Chaos that periodically rolls through, wreaking mayhem wherever it touches down―a kind of infinitely powerful, merciless tornado. Because the job of a mechanic is grueling and exhausting, after a certain period all of them are retired and sent to different parts of the cosmos to live out their days as "civilians." Their memories are wiped clean and new identities are created for them that fit the places they go to live out their natural lives to the end.
For the first time all retired mechanics are being brought back to duty: Chaos has a new plan, and it's not looking good for mankind...
Haupt-Genre
N/A
Sub-Genre
N/A
Format
Hardcover
Seitenzahl
280
Preis
32.82 €

Beiträge

1
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1

I would love to review it properly, unfortuntely I have no idea what I just read here. I picked it up because Neil Gaiman recommends it and I adore Neil Gaiman. When I finished American Gods, I was left with the same feeling of bafflement and incomprehension, but with a major diffrence: Gaiman anchors his magical realism in ancient myths, legends and cultural phenomenon most readers are familiar with. I may not always follow his logic or feel at ease in the worlds he creates but I can connect to them. I couldn't do that in Bathing the Lion. I'm familiar with Gods or with shapeshifting. It's the first thing kids encounter in fairy tales. But how am I supposed to connect to a red elephant wearing a wristwatch that doesn't like to be touched? The only familiar thing was the concept of dreams. Yeah, dreams are weird, I can accept confusing things happening in dreams. But this book whirls you through the timeline on max. speed and it was't even neccessary. I'm so sad I don't even know where to pour all of this dissappointment into... The story starts out like a tragic romance. We meet the first "main characters", then jump to the next POV and next and we still can't connect any of them to each other, until all of them share a dream with some weird stuff happening. None, the reader inculded, understand what happens. A new character enters, we jump between the POVS. All of our characters seem to be retired mechanics living their lives out on earth. Mechanics repair..uh, the universe I guess, it is never properly explained. They have several languages, I guess? It's never explained in detail. Just dropped between the lines. Mechanics can be two of a sort, I forgot the clunky names, it doesn't matter anyway, cz it's not expained what either of them do anyway. The adversary is a sommersault which happens to be chaos in form of... well, we don't know, because Carroll just beats around the bush and keeps telling us how much our heros still don't remember and that's why can't comprehend. Great, that's two of us. To make this all a bit more confusing, we lose all of the previous characters, that the book spent so much time bulding, describing in painful details who they are, what happened to them in the past, what they love to eat etc.pp. Our main character now is a side-character, that we lost sight of after his first entrance and hadn't had two decent pages of introduction, aside from mentioning several times how poorly dressed he is. He jumps a bit through the timeline, gains "all the knowledge", meets up with side-kick nr.2 and hands him "all the knowledge", what-ever-in-seven-hells-it-may-be. They share a smug, knowing grin and THE END! I'm gonna go bake an avocado-nut-cake to drown my sadness.

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