Customer Reviews

God's Fool

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Slouka takes the story of siamese twins and paints a beautiful image of their homeland, their life, and the politics of their time. The story starting in Siam and ending up in the American Civil War is engaging and heartfelt throughout. If you try to imagine what life would be like from the character's perspectives it lends a new level of appreciation for Slouka's intimate details of their epic struggles and their hinderances in everyday life. It is impossible not to feel for the characters as they are thrown into a world that views them as a circus act, which seems to corrupt everything from brotherhood to pure love. Of particular interest are the portions of the story where Slouka also relates to the reader how the two help each other out along their journeys, bound by fate for their eternity. It was a rare find on a random purchase that I came about this book, but I highly recommend reading it and passing it onto your friends, if nothing else the sociology of their lives and of the many places they visit is worth the buy.

In some ways, I really preferred this book to David Strauss' Chang and Eng. This one, told from Chang's perspective, was much more lyrical and better written. The descriptions of the Mekong Valley, the surreal world of Siam, and the familial love between Chang and Eng and their parents, wives and children were superbly drawn. Don't believe the reviews that say this is some sort of copy of Chang and Eng. It simply isn't true. The subject of 2 conjoined brothers who leave Siam and end up slaveowners, husbands and fathers certainly provides enough material for two novels, and many more than that as well. This book does a good job exploring the ontological aspects of the twins' conjoined state. They had one body, but did they have 2 souls? An interesting novel, well written and full of lucid observations about human nature.

The comparisons between this novel and the other one about Chang and Eng are absurd. This is an entirely original book. Beautiful and intelligent. I was was taken in from the beginning and enthralled throughout. This is the sort of novel that touches the heart and stimulates the mind. What could be better?

Beautiful, brilliant novel, original and indescribably amazing. Poignant and dryly, bitterly funny, one of my favorite books...everything you want a novel to be

As in Slouka's other work, this novel bears his mark in the sensitivity of cadence and voice rendered through a narrator (Chang) who weaves the historical into the present as a means of making sense and reconciling with life. Through nostalgia and reminisce, it is in Chang's voice as an old man that we are led through his poignant consideration of the seemingly random chances and vicissitudes of life as he recounted their lives lived - and how the extremes were leveled in the reliving of memory. Against the horrors of their early years as victims of exploitation, that which Chang chose to hold dear and cherish in his waning years eloquently depicted the triumph of spirit and humanity.

Slouka's sweeping reach and arc of narrative deftly rendered sensitive depictions of mood, character and local color. Recounting events through the singular perspective and internal voice of Chang, Slouka dignified their travails in his refusal to speculate or dwell on the likely human complications of their tethered state. Rather, his palpably rendered portrayal of their psychological burden of being so encumbered through life (despite the orneriness of their separate characters and pettiness of their grudges) draws on our empathy, such that the initial fascination with their state is forgotten. In short, Slouka humanized their persons without stooping to exoticise them.

What's notable is the singularity of Chang's perspective and voice. Unlike Darin Strauss's depiction of Chang and Eng (albeit from Eng's perspective), Slouka's depiction is decidedly from Chang's individual stance and perspective - a somewhat phlegmatic, more ruminative, reflective and self-castigating one but the more authentic for the quiet self-awareness and revealed personal failings. Slouka's evocation of Chang's internal voice roused in me the sense of bondage and implicit terror of imagining what it would be like to possess such an independent mind and spirit, and yet be bound so inextricably to someone so unlike oneself. While probably more likely to be fiction than fact in the specifics, the novel is admirable for its essential compassion and attestation to the likelihood that we all - encumbered and freakish or not, share a common humanity in the things we love, value and cherish, and which also makes us alike in our parlousness as objects/subjects of God.

I found this the strangest combination of a masterpiece and a flop. There is much beautiful, lyrical writing, and the historical details are vivid and compelling. But the choice to narrate in a prolix nineteenth-century "literary" style was a mistake, I think; it took away all empathy for the main character and his brother. In the end, though less virtuosic, Darin Strauss's version of the same story--Chang and Eng--is the more memorable and affecting novel.

This man's sentences never cease to amaze and inspire me. It is a complete shame that the other Chang and Eng book stole his thunder.

The book's greatest accomplishment is in its language, which is rich and yet precise, and illuminates the world of these two men so beautifully. The book has a genius way of dealing with their condition; it is the cause of everything and yet ignored at the same time. It is really their experiences as humans, and the unique way their bodies force them to look at the world, which is the most interesting.

My only critique is in the shape of the book. It almost seems as though the true shape of this book would be about two-hundred pages longer, pages I would have gladly read. I only hope that in the long-run, this more interesting, difficult, and ultimately more rewarding version of the two brothers' story will get its due.

The problem with Mark Slouka is that he fancies himself to be (a) a stylist, (b) an intellectual, (c) a creative genius, and, at least in his "critical" writings, (d) a contrarian. Which would have made him a very interesting writer to read indeed if he only knew how to tell the difference between (a) style and clutter, (b) thinking and whining, (c) originality and cliche, and (d) courage and boneheaded idiocy. As for this novel, it kind of reminds me of . . . wait a minute here, wasn't there . . . yes, wasn't there something--a novel, I dare say--on a similar--no, no, on EXACTLY the same theme, published, let's see now, about three years ago? I wonder what Mr. Slouka is working on now. Maybe a novel about a one-legged man in mad pursuit of a whale. Narrated, of course, by a third party. Yes, I quite like this idea. Just call me Slouka.