Customer Reviews

The Holy Land

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It is a shame that the last three books of the Tobias tetralogy (or quintology, if you include Barabbas) are not in print. What begins in The Sibyl is richly layered and continues in The Death of Ahasuerus, Pilgrim at Sea, and ends with this fine parable. Each book is sparsely written and, with each succeeding one, the story becomes more "fairy tale" like.

I love Lagerkvist's theology, his use of paradox, and his constant examination of faith and one's relationship to "god." Each of these stories mirrors an aspect of life. The setting for The Holy Land brings the series back to the setting of The Sibyl in Delphi which is now a ruined temple. This final book is more "scenic" than the others; short vignettes that gradually come together and conclude a wonderful parable that stretches from the crucifixion of Christ through the middle ages to today.

Lagerkvist won the 1951 Nobel for many good reasons!

Yes, to have the books in this quatralogy or whatever you call it out of print is definitely a shame -- it would be just made for a fat paperback with all the books included. You would also want to include the wonderful maze-like drawings that were in the hard-cover versions I read. Come on, publishers, it's a tragedy not to have this stuff available! Lagerkvist and Kazantzakis (sp?) seem to me to be very significant must-read authors in similar veins when it comes to coping with God, or the myth of God.

I have read 5 or 6 books by Lagerkvist. I read "Barrabas" first and then got into some other books of his after I intentionally started reading the Nobel Prize novelists. For me, I have found Lagerkvist to be unusually succinct. His quintology that "Holy Land" completes could easily have been one book in five parts. "Holy Land" for example, is 80 pages long and those pages seem almost to be double-spaced. It doesn't take long to read his books and, frankly, I haven't exactly come away with any profound thoughts afterwards. I noticed a number of times in "Holy Land" that Lagerkvist tosses ideas out there and then goes on to other things. A number of his ideas gave me pause to consider them but I couldn't detect a cohesive theme. Two marooned sailers have an opportunity to see things through the eyes of a people who know nothing of the faith and culture that they came from. Occassional revelations along this line are the essence of the book. There was plenty of room to develop things further. Perhaps Lagerkvist merely intended to give us things to work out on our own. The message I was left with was that we worship what we do not understand and what we value in the abstract. Ultimately, if we persevere with our faith, we will discover the true value of what it is that we followed on faith alone. Not bad, but there was definitely room for improving the delivery of the message. At least there is in my opinion.