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Messiah: A Novel (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "As Marie-Frances Claire Le Bec, ninety-six years old, dozed like a wilted sprig of mint on her deathbed, her granddaughter, Felicity Odille Le Jeune, waited..." (more)
Key Phrases: girl dick, people from history, cute ass, New Orleans, Sister Rodica, Major Notz (more...)

3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (19 customer reviews)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Waiting by her grandmother's deathbed, Felicity Odille Le Jeune makes one last request: "'I got a message for you to take to God!... Tell God,' she whispered, 'to grant me an orgasm.'"

Leave it to Andrei Codrescu to introduce a soupçon of sex into an already bizarre death scene featuring a televangelist named Jeremy "Elvis" Mullin, a lost lottery ticket, and Felicity herself, a New Orleans private detective whose "spiky short hair, baggy clothes, pierced nostril, and eight-hole black work boots were the manifestations of the 'be more manly every day' discipline she'd practiced for years. The goal of the regimen was to achieve maximum teenage boyishness by the time she turned thirty, and to maintain it indefinitely." It is the turn of the century, after all--December 1999, to be exact--and anything goes. Her grandmother's death has left Felicity alone in the world and with only one aim in mind: to take down the weaselly Mullin who had convinced Grandmère to hand over her two-million-dollar lottery ticket to his United Ministries.

Meanwhile, halfway around the world, Andrea Isbik, late of Sarajevo, has found refuge from the Serbian prison camps in Jerusalem. But Israel is just a stop along the road to the Big Easy for Andrea, and before long the two women have met and joined forces as Armageddon threatens. Codrescu has his tongue firmly in cheek as he piles on the millennial fears and cranks up the volume of nutty rhetoric in the final, pitched battle between Felicity's tribe of pierced and tattooed followers and the fanatical legions of the fundamentalist Reverend Mullin. Readers who prefer their apocalyptic panic leavened with a good dose of humor will find Messiah right up their alley. --Alix Wilber

From Publishers Weekly

Leave it to witty NPR commentator, poet, filmmaker (Road Scholar) and author Codrescu (The Blood Countess) to come up with an energetic if somewhat bloated novel about messianic fervor at the dawn of the next millennium. Felicity LeJeune, an aspiring New Orleans PI in her early 20s, waits at the deathbed of her grandmother. The dying woman, Felicity's last living relative, has long since fallen under the sway of the Rev. Jeremy "Elvis" Mullin, an evangelical preacher who collects souls as avidly as he has collected a personal fortune. With the help of the ultra-eccentric Major Notz, a family friend, Felicity decides to take down Mullin's empire?or at least blackmail him into returning the $2.5 million Mullin stole from Felicity. Halfway across the globe, meanwhile, the inhabitants of a Jerusalem convent are startled by the appearance of Andrea, an intensely sexual 16-year-old who may be a Bosnian war orphan or a Jew from Basque country. Whatever her origin, she proceeds to seduce first the convent's nuns, then a group of religious scholars living in the convent and, finally (after an appearance on Gal Gal Hamazal, the Israeli version of Wheel of Fortune), the entire Israeli populace. Through amazingly complex circumstances, Andrea relocates to New Orleans, where she fights for the fate of the postmillennial world alongside Felicity, Major Notz and the resurrected spirits of Nikola Tesla, Ovid and Mark Twain, among others, against Mullin and his hypnotized First Angels Choir. Codrescu's plot is beyond ludicrous, even for a tongue-in-cheek messianic thriller, but his writing is sprightly and his humor dead-on. Here, Codrescu gives the growing obsession with the year 2000 some of the joshing it deserves.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

Hardcover: 368 pages
Publisher: Simon & Schuster; 1St Edition edition (February 19, 1999)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0684803143
ISBN-13: 978-0684803142
Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.6 x 1.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (19 customer reviews)

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,053,021 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Front Cover | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!

Inside This Book (learn more)

First Sentence:
As Marie-Frances Claire Le Bec, ninety-six years old, dozed like a wilted sprig of mint on her deathbed, her granddaughter, Felicity Odille Le Jeune, waited impatiently for the end, wondering where on earth the old woman had found so much green chiffon to pass away in. Read the first page

Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
girl dick, people from history, cute ass

Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
New Orleans, Sister Rodica, Major Notz, Lama Cohen, Sister Maria, Father Hernio, Father Tuiredh, Saint Hildegard, Gal Gal Hamazal, Reverend Mullin, Father Zahan, Yehuda ben Yehuda, Language Crystal, Professor Li, Wheel of Fortune, Nikola Tesla, Mardi Gras, Mississippi River, Ben Redman, Gala Keria, Kashmir Birani, Bourbon Street, French Quarter, Joan of Arc, Earl Smith

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Front Cover | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!

Citations (learn more)

This book cites 23 books:

The Art of Love by Ovid on page 130, and page 131
The Blood Countess by Andrei Codrescu in Front Matter, and Back Matter
The Count of Monte Cristo (Cliffs Notes) by James L. Roberts on page 21
Selected Poems by Rodney Hall in Front Matter
Selected Poems (Ahsahta Press Modern and Contemporary Poets of the West Series) by Hazel Hall in Front Matter

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What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?

	80% buy the item featured on this page: Messiah: A Novel 3.9 out of 5 stars (19) $19.00
	14% buy The Dog with the Chip in His Neck: Essays from NPR and Elsewhere
	3% buy Casanova in Bohemia : A Novel 3.8 out of 5 stars (12)
	3% buy The Blood Countess 3.1 out of 5 stars (58) $24.98

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Customer Reviews

19 Reviews

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

Average Customer Review

3.9 out of 5 stars (19 customer reviews)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars This could have been great, it's merely good, September 10, 1999

By A Customer

From the editor of "Exquisite Corpse" magazine Andrei Cordrescu, we are given several novels in one, unfortunately, in some cases, such as thi--one would have proved sufficient.

One novel here might be called "The Shades" another "Felicity" Another "Gal Gal Hamazal" (which, by the way had me rolling with laughter).

It seems that Codrescu couldn't sustain the gargantuan project he began, although he did a slapdash job of making it seem his best. The black comedy is not lost on me, I merely wish that very cool characters like the Sarajevan orphan Andrea who herself seemed to be messianic enough on her own, and of that species of women one finds it hard enough to find let alone to depict: to Codrescu's credit he appeared to do this, her connubial and compassionate nature the most corporeal and transcendental as well as comic element of the book.

It's unfortunate that this satire careens at such breakneak manic Tom Robbinsesque speeds for at a slower pace or woven together (the sequences) with a stronger sensibility, Messi@h could have delivered the promised land it instead buffaloed it's way through. I suppose it's possible that Codrescu, himself an editor, felt in no need of an editor. I find that unfortunate, even the book jacket design was astonishing, and it was with great enjoyment that I breezed through nearly half the book having Messi@h spike a flat tire and some false notes straining after comedy, in particular with the obvious absurdities of "fundamentalist Christians" and the ribaldry of the "spirits" of our dead "great ones" (according to whom?) such as Aristotle coming back into bodies and incarnating after being disturbed during the cyberplay of tomboyish "Tank Girly" Felicity.

Andrei, please, take this back and edit it and give up the real Messi@h. I'd love to add it to my shelf of great great reads rather than consigning this novel to the stacks of benign and merely amusing books littering so many shelves.

We needed a little more of the adage "less is more." Don't mistake me, Codrescu is a great writer, but...but...

this could have been a miracle (sigh). We readers could have been satisfied but as it stands I was left longing. And for the record as it is possible to be too thin (and I would say too rich) it is also possible to be too clever.

Still, all in all a really good read.

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Great idea, mediochre execution, April 1, 1999

By A Customer

In which the reviewer pans a book that wasn't completely without merit.

Novel premise, interesting beginning, confused and out of character middle, sappy sitcom-like ending. How about some character development? The best books chronicle how their main character(s) learn from the experiences in the book, how they change to overcome obstacles. In Messiah, we see Felicity develop from two-dimensional to, well, two dimensional. Andrea learns that she can cause group climaxes -- gee whiz! She's been through hell on earth, been raped, had her family slaughtered, lost her home, and the best insight we get from Codrescu is that she thinks she might have whored it for four years. Well, at least it was titilating!

The best thing about this book is that it lets (no, it _forces_) readers to draw their own conclusions about every aspect of the story. But then, what part does the author play? Perhaps a mere conduit -- a medium through which the story is told without commentary. But who will channel Hermes once Major Notz dumps Carbon?

What a great book this could have been!

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars an epochal novel, like Don Quijote, April 23, 1999

By A Customer

Readers who noticed that "Messiah" is a great millenial tale are only half right. "Messiah" is also a great fin-de-siecle novel, like Don Quijote. Miguel de Cervantes parodied all the chivalric romances of the 16th century and the result was a timeless classic -- and the only chivalric (anti) romance left standing. "Messiah" parodies and subsumes all the millenial graphomania of the 20th century & sweeps clean a whole literature.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Alice in Wonderland with a pierced navel
MESSI@H is a tumultuous little novel, set in New Orleans during late December and early January 2000, Codrescu has turned his dark wit on millenialism, a gathering of angels, a... Read more

Published 23 months ago by Cecil Bothwell

2.0 out of 5 stars Where is the suspense
This is the first book I read by Andrei Codrescu. I had a lot of hopes. I enjoyed reading his book until the fifht chapeter or so and all of a sudden my interest dropped. Read more

Published on April 4, 2005 by C. Navarra

5.0 out of 5 stars Not enough fiction
Whereas the Blood Countess was overcontrived and somewhat tedious in narrative structure, Messiah is a total blast. Read more

Published on October 20, 2000 by Brian Budzynski

3.0 out of 5 stars Where's the excitement?
After a promising beginning, I found this novel boring. Let me recommend a better book in this general area of topic, THE LAST DAY by Glen Kleier. Read more

Published on June 30, 1999

5.0 out of 5 stars TOO MUCH FUN FOR ORDINARY BORING PEOPLE TO READ!!
This book was so much fun, I may just read it again! He's hit the millenial nail on head with this one! Read more

Published on June 23, 1999

1.0 out of 5 stars Waste of time!!
The first two chapters promised to make this an interesting and funny story. However, the book rapidly deteriorates in a diarrhea of words without any real substance. Read more

Published on June 9, 1999

5.0 out of 5 stars The Real, Actual, True Millennium
I wouldn't buy a book written by someone who doesn't know how to count.There are one hundred years in a century, right. Year one through one hundred, first century. Read more

Published on May 27, 1999

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting depiction of Heaven and the Universe.
Codrescu puts together an interesting set of heros and villians, and seems determined to work all religions into the "Grand Plan". Read more

Published on May 18, 1999

3.0 out of 5 stars A little more cerebral stimulation, please!
This is not a bad book if what you're looking for is primarily titilation. But if you want a quality millenium novel with a little more intellectual substance, a more... Read more

Published on April 21, 1999

5.0 out of 5 stars Rarefied fire of re-evolution : 'par Apocalyse au Noir'....
Proclaiming intimate & archival knowledge of 'le moyen appropos' to usher in anything BUT a comfort zone to immersion in the New Millenium, Andrei Codrescu's MESSI@H is both... Read more

Published on April 12, 1999 by ptirone@hotmail.com

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