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City of God : a novel by E. L. Doctorow
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City of God : a novel (original 2000; edition 2001)

by E. L. Doctorow

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1,5382511,607 (3.44)1 / 133
The best book I read in 2007, hands down. I enjoyed it so much and found it so inspiring that I scanned a page, printed it out, highlighted an important sentence, and mailed it to my beloved. It is now hanging on his wall. One of few books I wish had arms so that I could hug them. ( )
1 vote woolgathering | Jun 24, 2020 |
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Parts of it were astounding and thought provoking, but as a whole too disjointed, too ambitious maybe. I can see what the attempt was, but it didn’t bring me along.
  BookyMaven | Dec 6, 2023 |
St. Augustine receives retribution. Set in the Babel of NYC, a yearning soon-to-be-ex priest (who could only be Episcopal) can disassociate from his belief but not his need for it. This self-referential novel may be too ambitious but definitely is looking at the stars. Ruminating on our cosmology, and whether that is just another story we tell ourselves, and our history (whose story is always changing) the characters attempt to find their belief structure as the 20C comes to a pre-Apocalyptic end. Resembling a sacred text, the novel includes stories, songs, historical references, traditions and questions without definitive answers: the reader, as with all humanity, is responsible for imposing meaning, for finding signs and wonders, ourselves.

Pros: some lyrical passages, great lines, an imaginative premise and a whirlwind tour of the 20C, does a good job of incorporating current cosmic knowledge as it reverberates against age old questions — if God did not exist would we have to invent him, how do we keep re-inventing a deity to better serve present needs, what is the true nature of good vs evil?

Cons: one suspects NYC is the center of the universe for Doctorow, there is no inclusion of an Islamic character (I don’t think it makes sense to talk about Christianity and Judaism without Islam, at least in a supporting role), and while the novel has its moments and can be deeply appreciated on an abstract, intellectual level, there ends up being no real resonance, no emotional connection. Disclosure: I am not Jewish, do not love NYC, and am not old enough to remember the 60s, all of which may help its enjoyment. In some ways it tries to be a contemporary version of Dostoevsky’s ‘Diary of a Writer’. There is such a thin line between a work being deeply personal and being self-indulgent, and I wouldn’t profess to know what that line is myself, but I was left thinking the book could have been better than it was: perhaps a wildly inspired author needs a wildly inspired editor.

Ultimately, the novel is a reflection of sacred text: the reader will take what resonates with them and leave the rest behind. ( )
  saschenka | Jan 30, 2023 |
I may not be the person this book was written for. I struggled with it, and by the end I could hardly wait to see the last page. Yet I sense an important message within.

A novelist writes what comes into his head, whether it is a recounting of a conversation or the beginnings of a story. Sometimes he writes as if he is another person, from that point of view.

Essentially, the story is about religion. About Christianity vs Judeism, to be simplistic. A main character in the story is a Catholic priest (I think Catholic...Christian in any case) who is constantly questioning his beliefs and the messages in the bible. He knows that the bible was written by men, and he questions their motives.

A strange theft takes place that seems to speak to this priest. Much of the book dwells, in one way or another, on the reason for the theft and what happened to the item.

The story, if you can call it that, is told in this disjointed way, with ruminations and backtracking and people out of nowhere (or so it seemed to me), and I just didn't feel like I could handle this technique. I got through it but I can't say I gave it my all. Might be better as a book to study in a group, bit by bit. ( )
  slojudy | Sep 8, 2020 |
If you’re after a pacy novel with a great storyline and memorable characters that zips you from A to B in a rush of finely written prose, you’ll need to get through this quick so that you can get yourself something that fits your bill. This novel isn’t it.

What it is though is a series of sketches that, together, give you an impression of contemporary New York and bits and pieces of WW2 Europe and what being Jewish means in both contexts. Bear in mind though that people who are Jewish absolutely love writing about being Jewish. People who live in New York also love writing about New York. Combine this and, well, you get writing that is entirely self-absorbed.

Was it worth it? I’m not really sure, and that shows that this novel is probably for people who consider themselves to have more literary intelligence than myself.

Either that or actually this is pretty terrible. Of course, that is a distinct possibility. If you want to judge a book by what you can take away from it, then this is going to make very little impact on your scale of judgment.

As for me, I took so little away from it that, when I came to write this review, I could remember absolutely nothing about it. Even the cover didn’t help me. I had to head to the web and get a summary and, while reading it, memories of the grind that it was to read came flooding back.

So, take all that for what it’s worth. After all, who am I? ( )
1 vote arukiyomi | Sep 5, 2020 |
The best book I read in 2007, hands down. I enjoyed it so much and found it so inspiring that I scanned a page, printed it out, highlighted an important sentence, and mailed it to my beloved. It is now hanging on his wall. One of few books I wish had arms so that I could hug them. ( )
1 vote woolgathering | Jun 24, 2020 |
With a title like City of God, I expected references to St. Augustine of Hippo and I found them. I enjoyed this novel quite a bit, even if it did seem to meander a lot. We are introduced to several story threads, and it begins with someone talking about the Big Bang and how it didn't exactly explode. We also meet up with an author or journalist that wants to take over the life of this CEO or something. He woos the CEO's trophy wife, bugs his house, the whole shebang. We also have a flashback of some kind. One of the threads talks about how the narrator was born in Ulm and experienced the Holocaust. Then we have a number of other things too; the author examines song lyrics, and talks about this church that had it's cross stolen and taken to some new age Jewish temple.

All in all, it's hard to get a grasp on what is important, and what it's all leading to. Stylistically, I guess it's pretty eclectic, but that is intended from the description of the novel. ( )
  Floyd3345 | Jun 15, 2019 |
Vivid descriptions of life in a Nazi labour camp and of a bomber being shot down and crash landing in World War Two are the highlights of this book. The arcane arguments for the existence of God and faith while interesting may muddy the waters rather than clearing things up. ( )
  charlie68 | Apr 22, 2019 |
It's a middle-aged New York novelist, Everett, who is the putative author of what we read in the book. He meets periodically with a pries named Tom Pemberton and a grieving rabbi named Sarah Blumenthal. He also channels:
a Holocaust survivor, Albert Einstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein, etc. He inquires into everything from the origin of the cosmos to the Gnostic heresy to the social life of ants, as well as indiscreet God talk.
1 vote mrcia | Jan 22, 2018 |
I am not a huge fan of E.L. Doctorow's writing style -- it was employed so well in "Ragtime" but I've also seen it go awry in "Andrew's Brain." I approached "City of God" with some trepidation, which appears to have been warranted. My reaction to this book was "meh."

The is a bit of a story here, which is wrapped alongside Doctorow's metaphysical musings. I actually enjoyed portions of the story a lot -- particularly the Holocaust and heist stories.... the other threads weren't really interesting to me at all.

I went through phases with this book -- I hated it in the beginning (mostly due to writing style) and then when the stories picked up, I started to really enjoy it. The last third or so of the book really dragged as it got away from the stories I actually enjoyed. Overall, if you're a Doctorow fan, you'll probably love this book. If not, you probably won't. ( )
  amerynth | Jan 15, 2018 |
This book is on the 1001 Books to Read Before you Die list. I try to read at least 10 books from the list each year. I'll never read all the books on the list since there are actually almost 1300 books mentioned in the different editions. This was one that I was looking forward to since I have read other books by Doctorow and I thought they were great. I wasn't quite as impressed with this book although it was mainly because of the structure, not because of the content which I thought was well-written and interesting.

It is really hard to summarize the plot of this book because there are a number of storylines some of which intersect but others just seem to be left hanging. I guess the main plot is the one involving Father Pembroke (known as Pem as I shall refer to him henceforth), a preacher in the Episcopalian (or what nonAmericans would call Anglican) church. He works out of a small rundown church in a poor part of New York City. His church is robbed and one of the things taken is the large crucifix from in front of the altar. Some time later Pem receives a call from a Jewish rabbi who has found the crucifix on the roof of the building which houses his temple and his home. This brings Pem into contact with the rabbi and his wife who is also a rabbi. The wife's grandfather had survived living in a Jewish ghetto during World War II where he was entrusted to smuggle out accounts of how the Germans treated the Jews in the ghetto. These accounts were hidden by a Catholic priest but after the war they disappeared. Pem and the two rabbis embark on a search for them.

There are many diversions from this plot. Some are about how the universe was created; some discuss the origins of the book we call The Bible; yet others are restatements of classic songs. There is also a thread about the author doing research for this book including discussions he has with Pem and other people. Overall, the theme is about different religious and non-religious beliefs and how modern life views these beliefs.

I'm not sure that all of the diversions add to the book and some, in fact, seemed downright distracting. For instance, there is a story about some unnamed man who meets a married woman at a party, has an affair with her, then takes over the identity of her husband who becomes a street person. I have no idea what that had to do with the book. ( )
  gypsysmom | Nov 16, 2017 |
The City of God by E. L. Doctorow is a story told by the narrator Everett who is writing a story about Pem, an Episcopalian priest. In the telling of the story there is a lot of short little essays or philosophical musings and often it is hard to know who is the current voice. The story looks at human relationships with God, each other and with themselves. The story starts out with a missing cross that shows up at a synagogue called the Synagogue of evolutionary Judaism. Pem finds he no longer can believe in much of what he had, removes himself from the clergy and begins to explore Judaism. Mostly he believes in something that really makes no sense but amounts to a Christless Christianity and therefore Judaism is a better fit. He also happens to be in love with the rabbi, Sarah. So there is a lot of jumping around, we get quite a bit of a holocaust story. There is also a bit of Vietnam. There is a bit about film verses literature. While I enjoyed some of this book it really was an effort to read. Rating 3.14
  Kristelh | Jul 29, 2017 |
An amazingly sweeping novel, which somehow transcends all the post-modern clichés we encounter in it. A Episcopal priest with views somewhat too radical for church authorities meets two equally radical Jewish rabbis after vandalism and theft from his church. In a kaleidoscopic presentation which brings in the Creation, Wittgenstein (as characters), the holocaust, Viet Nam, the First World War, (amazingly, without ever seeming to over-reach) the plot explores issues of the place of faith in the late 20th century. A masterpiece, only slightly diminished by the happy rom-com style ending in which the right people end up married, and the even more conventional post-apocalyptic postscript. ( )
2 vote sjnorquist | Dec 20, 2014 |
I really liked this book. It is about a young boy coming of age, and coming to terms with life. I enjoyed the images and reading about life from the view of this young boy. ( )
  Dmtcer | Jun 3, 2014 |
Finally, a Doctorow I can really like! I knew keeping at him would pay off.

Multiple plot lines and stories, and all the pieces matter. Love this kind of story. ( )
  HadriantheBlind | Mar 30, 2013 |
Several stories at once. Not sure how some were even related. Did like all the ones about the Holocaust. Would not recommend. ( )
  autumnesf | Dec 25, 2010 |
can see what the author was trying to do here, but I struggled to fully engage with it. The main plot about Pem and his doubts about Christianity was interesting but I would have like more of this. The parts about Sarah's father during the war were great and I enjoyed the bits about film but the stuff about songs just went over my head and made the book too disjointed for me. A very ambitious work, but it didn't quite work for me. It struck me that the author was more concerned with writing an important novel than writing a good novel.
( )
  sanddancer | Oct 30, 2008 |
A story of love between religions, and of people struggling to define the existence of God, and what this means for them. Unfortunately I didn't really enjoy this book, it seemed to be trying too hard to be clever and postmodern. ( )
  Amzzz | Oct 21, 2007 |
Apart from the passages on song and the "old standards" (which didn't really work for me), I was enthralled and mesmerized by the breadth and depth of this novel. There is some truly beautiful writing, especially in the story of Sarah Blumenthal's father's experience in the Lithuanian ghettos. But what really grabbed me was Doctorow's ability to seamlessly weave together a number of different narrative threads - Holocaust survival and the search for the perpetrators of war crimes, a crisis of religious faith, and a blossoming relationship - into a magnificent novel that is clearly more than the sum of its parts. ( )
  pilgrimess | Jan 13, 2007 |
Emily picked this book up at the record store she worked at, couldn't quite get through it, and gave it to me. It took me quite a while as well; I read it in small chunks before bed. Being divided into shorter sections with varying points of view, it was easier to do that with this book than it is with many others. At the same time, every single passage in this book is packed with so much significance that, in many ways, it was harder to get through than many books twice it's length.

Deep stuff here. Excellently written, really, at a pretty mind-blowing level. Having tried my hand recently at some writing myself, I have a new-found appreciation for the ease with which Doctorow seems to create incredibly profound and beautiful passages. It's rare to get a book that shares such excellence on both a conceptual and purely language-aesthetic level.

So, go buy this, take your time with it, it's worth it. ( )
1 vote danbarrett | Aug 4, 2006 |
Imagine Miles Davis, Janis Joplin and Peter Tchaikovsky getting together at Carnegie Hall for one big symphonic music jam.

Now imagine that syncopated, bluesy, baton-waving overture translated from musical notes to printed words on a page.

That’s City of God, the newest novel from E.L. Doctorow (Ragtime, Billy Bathgate).

It’s been six years since Doctorow published his last novel, The Waterworks. Six long years for fans like me. The wait has been well worth it.

City of God is at once typically Doctorow; yet, at the same time, it is unlike anything else I’ve read. Postmodern in style, it shimmers with thought and energy that fairly explodes off the page with symphonic crescendos. It's told in so many different voices that sometimes it can be difficult to navigate the wildly varying passages. My advice? Just hang on and enjoy the ride.

To give you some indication of how explosive Doctorow’s book is, the novel comes out of the starting gate with a meditation on the Big Bang theory. It goes uphill from there.

Let’s get one thing straight from the start: book jacket blurbs and marketing campaigns have pigeon-holed this novel in the “mysteryâ€? category. Far from it. The only mystery in these pages centers around the deep questions of a soul in crisis, of a tiny human speck investigating a distant God.

Oh sure, there’s a bit of detective work at the start of City of God. A large brass cross is stolen from St. Timothy’s, an Episcopal church in lower Manhattan, and somehow winds up on the roof of the Synagogue for Evolutionary Judaism on the Upper West Side. But that crime of desecration is just one small part of the book. It’s a springboard for Doctorow to launch into a variety of other larger, heavier themes; and, just like a fat man bouncing off the end of a diving board (then miraculously doing a graceful swan dive), Doctorow somehow pulls it all off. Meanwhile, the diving board is still reverberating with a resonant thwacka-thwacka sound.

So, you ask, what is City of God about? Very simply, it’s about everything. Life, death, and all that jazz in between.

In these pages, you’ll find a love triangle between an Episcopalian priest at the end of his faith, a female rabbi at the forefront of radical faith and a novelist who seems to have faith only in his words. There’s theological exegesis, movie plots, pop songs, poetry slams and numbered lists. There are smoky jazz clubs, Nazi death camps and World War I trenches. I’m only scratching the surface here, you understand.

Doctorow’s novel concentrates on thought, not plot. Nothing is linear, it’s all a fragmented hodgepodge of delirious language that eventually takes on a remarkable energy of its own.

Picture David Foster Wallace involved in a car crash with Don DeLillo, each of them on the way to their publishers with unbound manuscripts. And then, after the fenders are bent and the radiators are still hissing, imagine those two writers frantically scooping up their hopelessly shuffled and mixed pages. Those of you who have read Infinite Jest and Underworld—two sprawling, layered novels by each of those gentlemen—will start to guess at the scope I’m hinting at here. The mind boggles.

And that’s one problem with City of God. There were times I got so boggled that I bogged down. Doctorow has long been known for being a writer with a lot on his mind. Here, there’s so much that spills onto the page that it can be overwhelming. Some passages reminded me of those textbooks I had to plow through in the Religious Studies class I labored through back in college. If you’re the kind of person who can breeze through Tillich, Barth, Niebuhr or St. Augustine (obviously referenced by the book’s title), then this should be light reading. Me? I waded through those deep waters with a blurred brain.

But when I emerged, dripping wet, oh what wonders awaited me! For every thick-worded exposition on divinity, Doctorow came surging back with a more accessible passage that thrilled me to the core.

I realize I’ve come to the end of this review without giving any examples of the novel’s symphonic prose. What a crime! Words, after all, are Doctorow’s forte. Here, then, are just a few of my favorite passages…

The planet earth is blessed with water, great slops of it, swaying tonnage of saline ocean and sea, clear blue lakes and fish tremblant rivers, streams, brooks, rills, and pulsing springs, mountain runoffs, rains, mists, fogs, and hurricanes. At our birth billions of years ago, an amorphous heap of buzzingly radiant star spinoff, we melted inward to a core of iron and nickel, molten at its edges, and formed on top of this a hot rock mantle, and mineral crust. We began immediately to cool, thus creating enormous clouds of vapor, which rained down into the great craters and basins of rock until the seas were filled. The rock dissolved into soil, granulated into seabed, and the seabed granulates salinated and produced the first bubbling nitrogenized, oxygenized possibilities of blind, dumb life.

* * * * *

Lord, there is something so exhausted about the NY waterfront, as if the smell of the sea were oil, as if boats were buses, as if all heaven were a garage hung with girlie calendars, the months to come already leafed and fingered in black grease.

* * * * *

Or this vividly violent excerpt from the novelist’s “biographyâ€? of his father, a soldier in combat during World War I, rendered in free verse:

He stumbled over a young soldier lying
with the muzzle of his own rifle in his mouth
and his head resting in an amalgam
of brain and mud.
My father stopped and hunkered down and,
for the first time since coming to France,
felt close enough to someone to mourn him.
This boy had been unable to endure
the hours and hours of cannonade
that my father had barely heard
as he took upon himself the urgencies of battle.
But now it opened up on him, as if he were this fellow’s heir,
The terrible din, mechanical yet voiced as human,
a thunderous chest-beating boast of colossal,
spittingly cruel, brutish, and vindictive fury
which he imagined as the primordial conversation,
when a tank loomed above him, the muddied treads
rampaging in air,
and in a great grinding spankling roar
spanned the trench and brought a rain of oil
in the darkness upon him.

It’s rousing word-music like that which brings me to my feet in an ovation. Bravo, Mr. Doctorow, bravo! ( )
2 vote davidabrams | May 17, 2006 |
Actually the ISBN is for a Hardcover First Edition not a Paperback first edition. Kind of confusing. ( )
  can44okie | Aug 28, 2020 |
I don't usually like when books are described as "ambitious," but that's really the best description I can think of. It has some really, really great sections but i was hoping it would come together a little more in the end. ( )
1 vote | Jetztzeit | May 15, 2020 |
To be honest, I first "read" this by Audiobook. I loved the telling of it so much, that I bought the hardcover as a follow up because I plan to reread it some day! Spiritually intriguing. Brilliantly done. ( )
1 vote | Cygnus555 | Mar 22, 2008 |
There's only one E.L. Doctorow! ( )
  larrypsy | Sep 16, 2007 |
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