Customer Reviews

The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show: A Novel (Plus)

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After reading her memoir, "Atlas of the Human Heart," I decided why not try her first novel.

Her storyline is unique, a traveling religious, spiritual side show, with her protagonist the stigmata star.

Interspersed are sketches of the protagonist's favorite Christian Saints, whose lives and writings influence the life of story's main character.

This author is a fresh, new voice in the literary world, and I believe she will go far.

Although this novel is just 219 pages, it seems just the write length. All loose ends are tied neatly together, and the ending is touching.

This novel by Ariel Gore is an interesting satire of Catholic religion and of American society. The author is able to sprinkle metaphors, religious or otherwise, with the greatest of ease. She writes with clarity, even when she changes tenses, which is appropriate for how the narrative flows. As another reviewer noted, she might go far; she is indeed a fresh voice in the genre of American literature. Although the novel is short, it is philisophical and insightful without being pompous. I look forward to new work by her in the future. One drawback, however, is her characterization. Frankly, the only interesting character, in my opinion, is the protagonist, who is the only character that has a purpose in life. Maybe the other characters haven't yet seen the light, and that is the point. Perhaps this is also because of the novel's length, but maybe it's because the other characters have little to recommend themselves besides acting like the vagabond malcontents that they are.

Take a rollicking roadtrip with a troupe of religious misfits, spinning along the fine line between insanity and saint-ity. A captivating story spiced with renegade-Catholic wisdom for living your own mythology.

Another fabulous piece of writing from Ms. Gore. The way in which she weaves words always leaves me wishing it would never end.

I especially loved the passages about the saints - something I have always been interested in.

Read it on a cold, rainy night... you'll want to turn off the phone, lock the bedroom door and put the dishes and laundry off indefinitely.

Her character's were strong and emblematic of the brokenness people experience in American society. You could say that each character experiences their own death and resurrections, the book focusing on that of young Frankka.

Characters are healed by their own self acceptance and ability to stare themselves in the face and recognize who they see.

Ariel Gore's book The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show was a great mix of fact and fiction, and who knows where one ends and the other begins in life anyway!

The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show is about Frankka, a lapsed Catholic with a rather peculiar psychic ability: while fasting, she can concentrate on her wrists and make them bleed. For seven years she lives on the road with a performance troupe that includes a drag queen who levitates while dressed like a Catholic nun, a fortune teller and former battered wife with a small child, a fire-breather, and a bearded woman. They rarely stay in the same town or city for a week, and satirizing the Christian religion means they sometimes encounter hostility from fundamentalists (including the "God Hates Fags" picketers whom I frequently saw in Kansas). Meanwhile, Frankka has very realistic and moving flashbacks to psychological traumas from her childhood and youth.

Although I normally avoid books that are from a Xian perspective, I decided to read The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show because Ariel Gore impressed me at a couple of author readings. To my relief, this book did not handle Xianity in a way that made me want to hurl chunks: instead, the narrator is very critical of the patriarchy in organized Catholicism and aware that goddesses such as Brigit were taken and turned into saints. The book goes on to show that even Christianity--and dare I saw Catholicism--can involve genuine spirituality, when it is in the mystical tradition rather than the way it is practiced as an organized religion. Frankka has a hobby of writing her own versions of the lives of saints, each a mystical individual. If only they were typical.

This is an excellently written literary novel with strongly developed, believable, and engaging characters.