GILEAD
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Description
“Quietly powerful [and] moving.” O, The Oprah Magazine (recommended reading)
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award, GILEAD is a hymn of praise and lamentation to the God-haunted existence that Reverend Ames loves passionately, and from which he will soon part.
In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He "preached men into the Civil War," then, at age fifty, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle.
Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father--an ardent pacifist--and his grandfather, whose pistol and bloody shirts, concealed in an army blanket, may be relics from the fight between the abolitionists and those settlers who wanted to vote Kansas into the union as a slave state. And he tells a story of the sacred bonds between fathers and sons, which are tested in his tender and strained relationship with his namesake, John Ames Boughton, his best friend's wayward son.
This is also the tale of another remarkable vision--not a corporeal vision of God but the vision of life as a wondrously strange creation. It tells how wisdom was forged in Ames's soul during his solitary life, and how history lives through generations, pervasively present even when betrayed and forgotten.
Book Information
Posts
Abgebrochen bei 43%
Marilynne Robinsons Gilead besticht durch einen poetischen und meditativen Schreibstil, der eine ganz eigene Atmosphäre schafft. Allerdings fand ich den Stil sehr schwer zugänglich – die verschachtelten Sätze und die langsame Erzählweise machten es mir schwer, wirklich in die Geschichte einzutauchen. Obwohl die Sprache zweifellos schön ist, empfand ich das Lesen als mühsam und wenig fesselnd. Letztlich habe ich das Buch kurz vor der Hälfte abgebrochen, da es mich einfach nicht gepackt hat.
2024: abgebrochen nach ca. 35% Sprachlich besonders und überzeugend, doch inhaltlich will der Funke bei mir einfach nicht überspringen. Dadurch, dass es sich um Briefe handelt und in diesen von verschiedenen Episoden des Lebens erzählt werden ist die Geschichte an sich recht zusammenhanglos. Ich merke wie ich immer wieder gedanklich abschweife und der fehlende rote Faden hilft mir natürlich auch nicht bei der Konzentration.
Description
“Quietly powerful [and] moving.” O, The Oprah Magazine (recommended reading)
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award, GILEAD is a hymn of praise and lamentation to the God-haunted existence that Reverend Ames loves passionately, and from which he will soon part.
In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He "preached men into the Civil War," then, at age fifty, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle.
Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father--an ardent pacifist--and his grandfather, whose pistol and bloody shirts, concealed in an army blanket, may be relics from the fight between the abolitionists and those settlers who wanted to vote Kansas into the union as a slave state. And he tells a story of the sacred bonds between fathers and sons, which are tested in his tender and strained relationship with his namesake, John Ames Boughton, his best friend's wayward son.
This is also the tale of another remarkable vision--not a corporeal vision of God but the vision of life as a wondrously strange creation. It tells how wisdom was forged in Ames's soul during his solitary life, and how history lives through generations, pervasively present even when betrayed and forgotten.
Book Information
Posts
Abgebrochen bei 43%
Marilynne Robinsons Gilead besticht durch einen poetischen und meditativen Schreibstil, der eine ganz eigene Atmosphäre schafft. Allerdings fand ich den Stil sehr schwer zugänglich – die verschachtelten Sätze und die langsame Erzählweise machten es mir schwer, wirklich in die Geschichte einzutauchen. Obwohl die Sprache zweifellos schön ist, empfand ich das Lesen als mühsam und wenig fesselnd. Letztlich habe ich das Buch kurz vor der Hälfte abgebrochen, da es mich einfach nicht gepackt hat.
2024: abgebrochen nach ca. 35% Sprachlich besonders und überzeugend, doch inhaltlich will der Funke bei mir einfach nicht überspringen. Dadurch, dass es sich um Briefe handelt und in diesen von verschiedenen Episoden des Lebens erzählt werden ist die Geschichte an sich recht zusammenhanglos. Ich merke wie ich immer wieder gedanklich abschweife und der fehlende rote Faden hilft mir natürlich auch nicht bei der Konzentration.