Reading 1001 discussion

Can a book that is bloated, incredibly slow, that veers off into dead end tangents, discusses at length, as an example, the whole concept of age as interpreted in the Bible, also be a masterpiece? Yes, I think so. The quality of the writing, the clear presentation of the thoughts and motivations of human beings, the humor and wit, often expressed as winks and nods between the author and the reader, are very compelling. Mann has many of the symbols and allegories of Christianity interplay with those of other religions, in particular those of ancient myths that still stand as good stories to this day. He tells a well-known tale and stretches it out to build a complete ancient world with all its Egyptian marvels and ancient Hebrew origins. In this stretching Mann speaks about time itself and the nature of memory. Why do we even have myths, why do we remember them? The book lingers much too long on Potiphar’s wife, and also on Tamar and her insistence on being in the line of the inherited blessing that leads up to Christ. Yet, what leads me to believe that the book is a masterpiece is the way that Mann manages to balance the discussion of Gods in general with the very intimate relationship Jacob has with his God, the way the book balances the nature of sibling rivalry with the specific betrayal of one brother, the way the book balances the moral authority of the concept of forgiveness with the bringing together of twelve brothers into one family and their shared hugs of relief. The book is fat, huge, very slow, overwhelming, and wonderful.

A monster of a book in which Mann imagines the life of Joseph from the biblical book of Genesis (Joseph of the coat of many colours, dream interpreter to Pharoah). The first of four parts is entirely about his father, Jacob, who worked for 7 years for his future father-in-law to win the hand of Rachel, but was tricked into marrying her sister instead and then had to serve another 7 years. There are many other stories about him, mostly taken from the Bible and expanded with a great deal of artistic licence.

Part two gives the same treatment to Joseph's betrayal by his brothers. In part three he arrives in Egypt as a slave but makes a success of his situation before experiencing a downfall. In part four he meets Pharoah.

The basic story will be well known to anyone brought up in the Jewish, Christian, or Islamic traditions, but Mann definitely puts his own spin on it, taking liberties with the events recorded in scripture that could be amusing or annoying or both, depending on your perspective. It is also a wonderful work of historical fiction with a whole world built for us with its competing religions, preoccupations, mores, and characters. Some of the characters were less convincing than others - the women are rather one-sided, and there are several iterations of the wise and faithful steward (Eliezer and his son, Mont-Kaw, Mai-Sakhme) who seemed interchangeable to me.

Amazing in many ways, sometimes funny, sometimes obscure, with lots of authorial comment, but just too hard going to get 5 stars, so I gave it 4. Glad I read it but glad to move on!

** 1/2

Not hiding the fact that I struggled with this book. Sure, it can be quite a feat to fictionally stretch the stories of a couple of books from the Bible and mix them up with some idealistic Egyptian pharaoh sub-story in a fictional style that would have fitted well with the Aryan propaganda (even though Mann was clearly not one of those maniacal Nazis) to retell the tale of Joseph and his Brothers (and his father Jacob, who occupies a substantial chunk of the first half of the book). For starters, this is not the kind of topic that excites me, even with the addition of the phaoronic backdrop. And the story (or rather the essays into justifying one or other of the actions of the protagonists) gets excrutiatingly long that it became easy to lose interest. Sure, Mann's book is quite a feat and there are some passages of good prose in it, but I don't feel it should have been that long (note: the English edition is a dense 1500-page barbell; it probably equates to 2500 pages if it were a set of paperbacks).