The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by José Saramago

Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend-the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore.

When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. Fiction that engages the mind as much as the spirit as, in eloquently supple prose, it seeks to understand faith.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Unless the Devil is the Devil, God cannot be God.' Jesus goes on to His destiny, but with a caveat: in the hope of averting the bloodshed implicit in the founding of Christianity, he asks to be crucified as King of the Jews, not as the Son of God. Even the Devil, an ambivalent figure who often intervenes positively in Jesus's life, is moved to repentance, but God rejects his offer: 'Because I cannot exist without the evil you represent.

Saramago's God, who resembles a successful CEO, wants to use Jesus and the church He will found to expand His dominions and when Jesus wants to know, 'How much death and suffering Your victory over other gods will cause?' God answers with a long list of martyrs, wars of faith, and institutions like the Inquisition. All the familiar stories-the Annunciation, the Slaughter of the Innocents, the Miracles, and the Crucifixion-are related with a nod to postmodern sensibilities, but they're secondary to Saramago's main purpose-to suggest that Jesus had to live and die as much for the benefit of God as for the Devil, both of whom appear in person. And it is this emphasis on Jesus's appreciation for the ordinary joys and virtues of human life-sexual love, family, nature, friendship, honor-that make the conflict between the desires of God, here indeed His father, and what He himself perceives to be earthly virtues, so tragic. Here, the Christian story is told from the point of view of Jesus, a young man very much of his time and place in spite of his great destiny. Now making its US debut, a novel from noted Portuguese writer Saramago (The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, 1990) that- despite its provocative conclusions and sometimes irreverent tone-is a profoundly different but no less significant life of Christ.

The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by José Saramago