2022 #31 American Gods (Gaiman)

 

American Gods by Neil Gaiman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This could have been so bad. It could have been full of easy to grasp metaphors and clichés. It could have been sensationalist drivel without any depth.

But it wasn't. It was a ridiculously amazing experience.

No review can adequately carry all this book has to give, but Gaiman's intercultural pantheon is something to behold. Pulling from a wide variety of traditions (Egyptian, Nordic, African, Greek, Germanic, Haitian, and more...) somehow the "fantasy" aspects become all too believable. No need to suspend disbelief, because Gaiman crafts a world where fact versus fiction really isn't all that important. Where Lucy Ricardo can be a...prophet? A taxi driver a jinn. And an ex-con (sort of) can be one of the most likeable (and quixotic) protagonists to surface in literature of the last fifty years.

Gaiman's amazing and encyclopedic cultural knowledge flows through the book with references as disparate as Saint-Saëns and The Beatles to Hieronymous Bosch. Everything is at once theatrical and ordinary, and this is the true feat. Nothing is not darkness in this land, nothing is something into which Shadow (the protagonist) can walk "with a strange fierce joy." (484).

It is a shame that Joseph Campbell died well before this book was written because Gaiman has both challenged and bolstered the idea of the monomyth. He has captured the iterative nature of myth, illuminating how it operates in our modern lives, dancing in between religion and science. And despite the depth of the book, it is full of humor and semi-sardonic tropes: "I think," said Mr. Nancy, "that wherever two men are gathered together to sell a third man a twenty-dollar violin for ten thousand dollars, he will be there in spirit." (551)

This could be a good storybook. But it can also be much more than that. Take the time to dig in---look up the characters in world mythology. Relish the double takes. Go back, read again. You won't lose the flow because there isn't any. And that, for once, is a good thing.

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2016 #5 Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture (Lévi-Strauss)

This is not actually number five--I read this last semester while prepping my Orpheus and Music seminar. But I temporarily mislaid the book, so I wasn't able to write the review until now. :-)

 Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture by Claude Lévi-Strauss
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"In order for a culture to be really itself and to produce something, the culture and its members must be convinced of their originality and even, to some extent, of their superiority over the others; it is only under conditions of under-communciation that it can produce anything. We are now threatened with the prospect of our being only consumers, able to consume anything from any point in the world and from every culture, but of losing all originality." (20)

Observations like this abound in Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture. Lévi-Strauss, whose blending of anthropology and philosophy made him one of the most interesting scholars of myth, here offers a set of expanded lectures originally broadcast in 1977 on a CBC radio program called Ideas. In the second essay, "'Primitive' Thinking and the 'Civilized' Mind", Lévi-Strauss reveals the "totalitarian ambition of the savage mind" as distinctive from scientific thought, and how the former results in only the illusion of understanding. He also notes, however, that primitive people had the capacity for "civilizing" the mind, but simply had no need of it, calling upon instead a "fantastically precise knowledge of their environment and all its resources" (19)--something we have (regrettably) lost in our "civilized" state. This supports his concept of myth as a conceptual framework for binaries. It is these binaries that move us toward more qualitative scientific thinking, helping us to "understand a great many things present in mythological thinking which we were in the past prone to dismiss as meaningless and absurd." (24)

This collection of five essays would be a great introductory primer for the reader not yet ready to dig into The Raw and the Cooked or The Savage Mind. The most sage advice comes from Wendy Doniger in her most excellent foreword: "The trick is to jettison Lévi-Strauss right before the moment when he finally deconstructs himself." Indeed, those words apply to the works of many of our great contemporary thinkers.