Shelve this great, compact novel next to other dramas that put us in the scene and in the minds of the religious figures of our cultural history. Books by Hesse, Lagerkvist, Kazantzakis are proper companions.

On a desert cliffside near Jericho, a strange miracle takes place when a vile merchant is brought back from death by the touch of a ethereal young man. The merchant’s wilderness cohort includes a handful of more or less pious citizens who are conducting ritual renunciations of town life. What the revived merchant makes of his opportunity to dominate them is the heart of the story.

The young man, called Jesus, a fiercely intense practitioner of the denial of the body, makes the story a commentary on the meaning of Jesus, and the impact, or lack of it, on the struggle to live.

its funny because louisa bought me this book. and it is all about jesus. hah.

really slow. really slow and really boring. and i'm not all that into historical fiction about jesus.

Jim Crace offers a real-life, mostly secular re-imagining of the biblical story of Jesus’s 40 days in the wilderness. The young Galilean is just one of a group of men and women choosing to embark on a “quarantine” of fasting and prayer in caves in the Judean desert. Chance brings a grasping, immoral merchant, Musa, and his pregnant wife to the same spot, and a drama plays out that seeds the myth of this period of Jesus’s life. An intriguing story, told elegantly with a poetic rhythm. It won the 1997 Whitbread Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction the same year.

An audacious premise, and a promising beginning. But not so much of a story. It was a very interesting thought experiment that turned into an ensemble narrative, but ultimately dispersed into vagueness. The writing was good.

Blisteringly good read.

This started out interesting, and even somewhat comedic, but lost me somewhere along the way. For me, the idea of the book got mired in details and description. I needed more mental energy than I had at the time, I suppose. Many passages were powerful and well executed, but others felt aimless. And yeah I could have done without the gory details of the extremes of Musa’s evils. But I suppose the author preferred to shock rather than imply.

Upping this a star due to its aftertaste. As this book swirled around in my mushy brain, my opinion of it grew. The idea of the book started to dominate in my memory of it. And the idea of it is amazing.

Not for me, despite loving Jim Crace's Harvest. I don't really know the story of Jesus's 40 days in the wilderness. Would I have liked this better if I did? I'm not sure. Beautiful, beautiful writing, but it - the story, the characters - just didn't engage me.

Wonderful. Don’t read the description on here, it has spoilers!!!

A retelling of Jesus' 40 days in the wilderness I heard about from Bret Anthony Johnston on NPR's "You Have to Read This" segment. It's still percolating, but I think I might love it. Below is a passage from page 219 that feels indicative for a number of reasons:

"But there was also something rich, at times, about the scrub, despite itself. Something sustaining, unselfish, fertile even. Perhaps this was because it made no claims. It did not promise anything, except, maybe, to replicate through it's array of absences the body's inner solitude and to free its tenants and its guests from their addictions and their vanities. The empty lands--these very caves, these paths, these desert pavements made of rock, these pebbled flats, these badlands, and these unwatered river beds--they were siblings to the empty spaces in the heart. Why else would scrubs have any holy visitors at all? Ten thousand quarantiners had come to these parched hills and passed their days, some delirious with illness; others feverish with god, and guilt, and lunacy, unravelled from themselves by visions of a better and eternal world; the rest made mad by fasting. Yet at the end of their forty days, the scrub sent all of them away enriched and dryly irrigated."