Q (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "What I have to do..." (more)
Key Phrases: holy pimp, most honourable lord, reverend lord, Magister Thomas, Donna Demetra, Holy Office (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The story of Q begins with the mystery surrounding the author(s). Luther Blissett, the "author" of Q is the name of a Jamaican soccer player who played for AC Milan in the early l980s. He was victimized by Italian fans, whose racist and nasty comments caused his career to take a dive. This hapless fellow inspired a group of Italian artists to appropriate his name and attach it to all manner of projects. There are Luther Blissetts writing, drawing, and carrying out elaborate hoaxes all over the world. Four young Italians in Bologna wrote Q in the mid 1990s. It remains a bestseller in Italy and has become a cult hit throughout Europe.

Q is set at the time of the Reformation. After Luther hangs his 95 theses on the door of the Wittenberg Church, nothing is ever the same in the hallowed halls of Christianity. One of the sects which sprang up during the Reformation was the Anabaptists, Christians who discredited infant baptism and believed that the Bible was the only rule for faith and life. Q follows the adventures of a student of Thomas Munzer, Anabaptist and leader of the abortive Peasants' Revolt of 1524-25, who goes under many names, the first of which is Gustav Metzger, and Q, a papal informer. These two travel throughout Europe, trying to suss out each other's identity, sending letters to Munzer and to the Pope, making friends and enemies, hating each other's deeply felt convictions. Metzger is staying one step ahead of the heretic hunters, bent on destroying all supporters of Luther.

The translation is rickety, at best. There are long, sonorous passages filled with the formal language of the times, and then a jarring change to modern slang. "On the point of death they all denied everything that had been extorted from them with torture: small consolation, and I don't know how many were able to die in peace because of it... It was November or December 1531, around the time Lienhard Jost kicked the bucket." There is a tremendous amount of scholarship contained in the novel and the blend of fact and fiction allows room for intrigue, politics, betrayal, and that ever-familiar conundrum of terror in the name of religion. At over 750 pages, it requires a great deal of patience and attention on the part of the reader, not all of which is richly rewarded. A final cavil: Wittenberg is misspelled in the jacket copy. --Valerie Ryan

From Publishers Weekly

Rich religious history is turned into bloated, tedious fiction in this Reformation-age epic produced by four anonymous writers lurking behind a pseudonym. In 1517, Martin Luther nails his 95 theses to the door of Wittenburg Cathedral. In 1525, a one-time theological student, a radical Anabaptist who goes under a number of names over the course of the narrative, but who is initially called Gustav Metzger, pulls off the first of a number of hairbreadth escapes from heretic hunters keen to spill the blood of any would-be supporter of Luther. For the next 30 years, even as Protestantism slowly makes inroads across Europe, Metzger is tracked by a papal spy who, traveling incognito under the eponymous moniker Q, keeps his boss apprised while he and his compatriots attempt to crush the movement on behalf of the Vatican before the schism widens. Needless to say, they fail. Translator Whiteside has done the best he could with the material: stripped-down chapters breathlessly composed of short, snappy paragraphs ("The girl smiles. She's extremely beautiful") alternate with epistolary passages given a faux-historical gloss. Speech anachronisms abound throughout, especially when events are related by Metzger and company (" 'What the fuck did you say? What? So you're not dead, but you scare me anyway, pal, you scare me'"), and most of the characters sound so alike that not only do they remain lifeless on the page, they are often indistinguishable from one another. A good amount of historical research is lumped throughout, but the period stylings are wooden and the story never gains enough momentum to carry readers along.
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 768 pages
• Publisher: Harcourt; 1 edition (May 3, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151010633
• ISBN-13: 978-0151010639
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.2 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #447,449 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Who will carry the sword that will run the wicked through?", June 19, 2004

By	Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)

The turbulent years of the early Reformation are the focus of this novel of ideas written by four young people who call themselves, jointly, "Luther Blissett." Thomas Muntzer, a leader of the Anabaptists, believes that Martin Luther has become too close to the prince bishops, from whom he accepts protection, to be an effective leader. Gustav Metzger, the speaker, is one of Muntzer's followers, accompanying him during the trauma of the Peasants' Revolt (1524 - 26), which Luther opposes, and serving as an on-the-scene observer. When the revolt fails, villages are leveled, the rebels are put to the sword, and many of the leaders of the revolt are arrested, tortured, and then beheaded.

The revolt fails, in part, because of a spy named Qoelet (Q), whose diaries and letters to Cardinal Gianpietro Carafa, reveal his duplicitous actions. As the Anabaptist speaker escapes from one bloody crisis after another, changing his name whenever he changes locations, Q tries to track him down and to counteract the increasingly dangerous effects of Protestantism. Each of the speaker's failures is related to Q's countermoves, as the speaker travels throughout Germany to Switzerland and the Low Countries, following the spread of ideas. Twenty-five years after surviving the Peasants' Revolt and vicious reprisals against the Reformation everywhere he travels, the speaker, now known as Tiziano Rinato (Titian), arrives in Venice with the financing he needs to distribute "heretical" pamphlets. He and Q finally meet for a showdown.

The authors' casual, slangy style, filled with profanities, conveys the frustration and trauma of these four-hundred-year old events in a language with which the contemporary reader can easily identify. United primarily through the beliefs of the Reformation, the novel is episodic and not particularly suspenseful because the tension between the speaker and Q is not strong. These men do not know each other, and neither the reader nor the speaker can see Q's maneuverings until after the fact.

The complex events of the early Reformation have shaped the intellectual and historical destinies of western civilization, and the novel reflects this complexity, with the narrative alternating from 1555 to 1517 and from 1538 to 1527, and back. The reader must create his/her own timeline, though the events within each episode are clear. Filled with exciting, hair's-breadth escapes from disaster, fascinating and memorable depictions of (real) historical characters, insightfully presented intellectual conflicts, and dramatic events coming fast and furiously for over seven hundred pages, the novel is a rewarding adventure for the reader with a serious interest in the Reformation. Mary Whipple

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent spy story, if you manage the first 200 pages, July 9, 2003

By	Iason Chatzakis (CAMBRIDGE, MA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Q (Spanish language edition) (Hardcover)

Starting this book, it felt like I was reading a well-written historical novel. I found it more educating than entertaining, especially since it has to do with an era I knew very little about. However I did like the storytelling style - chapter by chapter, the two main characters alternate in the narration. One is an Anabaptist religious fighter, the other one his adversary, a spy in the payroll of a very powerful high-ranking Vatican official.
One thing I can say for sure is that the story gets better and more gripping as one reads along. After getting through the first 200-250 pages, I found myself more and more reluctant to put the book down, as it evolved into one of the best and most exciting spy stories I have ever read. From Muenster,Germany to Holland and on to Venice (with quite a few detours along the way) the reader is carried along in the swirls of a fascinating (although a bit complicated) plot.
In a few words: keep persisting in the beginning, you'll see that it's worth it.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An indictment of tyrrany, January 25, 2006

By	Hackshadows (Melbourne, Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Q (Paperback)

I loved this book, I just don't see the negatives with it that other reviewers have. Yes, the short, episodic-like nature of the chapters often meant that it had to cut around the action a lot. But I never felt disconnected from the action or the ideas. No, it's probably not 100% historically accurate (having studied the reformation myself, i could see some flaws, mainly conceptual rather than factual), but few historical novels (or works of history, for that matter) are 100%. But there are lots of allegorical overtones in this book, as can be seen with the illustrations at the end that are often accompanied by quotes from political prisoners and petitions from the last decade or two. I would imagine many conservatives and those on the political right would have major problems with some of the issues raised in this book.

And all this aside, I thought it was just a bloody good read (despite guessing Q's real identity about a hundred, hundred and fifty pages in).