Present Books Toward Life After God
| Original Title: | Life after God |
| ISBN: | 0743231511 (ISBN13: 9780743231510) |
| Edition Language: | English |
Douglas Coupland
Paperback | Pages: 291 pages Rating: 3.79 | 11500 Users | 463 Reviews
Representaion To Books Life After God
There's an obvious problem with a 5-star rating system (or any graded system, really) being used to rate god-damned BOOKS, you know? This has probably been brought up previously, but c'mon: I'm going to validate Virginia Woolf by giving her 5 stars, and also I really fucking loved Harry Potter so you know what, that's 5 stars too, so Harry Potter's 5 stars is on the same level as Woolf's 5 stars. And Comedy of Errors is only 4 stars, as is the entirety of Milton's work, but Trumpet of the Swan, which holds a special place in my heart since I read it like a dozen times when I was 10 years old, is 5 stars. And somehow these all exist in the same ratings universe? I mean really now.Does 3 stars mean you shouldn't read it? Do you have to read all the 5-star books first, because they're the best? I don't know if anyone really thinks this, but still. The greatest works of art are going to be distinctly flawed in some way, represented by their limitations as much as their transcendent qualities, and it is of course our experience with that piece of art that matters most; a dynamic & breathing thing, largely independent of how pristine the work itself is.
I'm not sure why this tirade is coming up in my first write-up of Douglas Coupland's work, except for this: This is a distinctly flawed book, and it is far from his "best" work in many ways (Microserfs is an easy favorite, for me) and in many ways Coupland's work is distinctly flawed as a whole. Well fuck it, it's supposed to be. He writes about flawed people living in a flawed world saturated by monumentally flawed popular culture. This is his stake in the matter. As a writer he is one of the most vivid stylists working today, and his style is pared down and simple and funny and dire and deadpan, and in my own mental bookshelf I usually catalog him near Dennis Johnson, only less dire (keep in mind, "less dire than Dennis Johnson" is like saying "less devastating than the Black Plague").
I think Coupland's work actually comes out of some of the same territory as something like Zippy the Pinhead, only without the supersaturation of Discordian philosophy -- it recognizes a landscape dominated by disposable culture, and neither revels in it or reviles it, but instead takes a straight Buddhist approach, accepting it as spiritual matter because it is there, the way the mountains or rivers are there; Coupland is on the spearhead of writers grappling with spirituality in late-stage capitalism, as the Plastic Age turns mercilessly into the Electronic Age. Mr. Coupland's generation is staunchly on the seam between these two ages, it should be noted.
Oh yeah, the book itself: Coupland is a writer to binge on -- to read five or 10 or all of his books back-to-back -- and I think Life After God is a wonderful place to start. In a way this is a perfect book, because in most published versions it is a tiny pocket-sized experiment that you can read in a few hours, with large print and wonderful little drawings on many of the pages. It is a reminder of the difference between BOOKS and NOVELS, and clearly here Douglas Coupland has made a BOOK about the strange, thin, center-space in the ven diagram of consumerism and spirituality. All his books are like that, maybe, but Life After God is pared down to the essentials.
Let me try to say something more substantial about the book then: I think the question at the core of Life After God is how humans find themselves in a culture that has accelerated past the point where humans actually can experience it -- what then, are we left with, and how do we find religious experience in this shell? It's easy to forget, given how annoying generational stereotypes are, that there was a philosophy of very real, very powerful despair & disillusionment at the core of Generation X's bleak slacker ethos. The feeling here is that the vibrant, blind optimism of shiny happy people has left behind anyone who stopped to actually think about things, sort of like a hitchhiker left by the side of the road in a swirling of discarded McDonald's cups & glamor magazines. 'We are what is left,' seems to be the mantra -- 'good riddance to the rest of you, but now what?'
Because of the crass nihilism that is so typically ascribed to Gen-X folks, I'm going to say this: the most daring and interesting and wonderful part of this book is the part where the narrator admits that he believes in God; that he really does think of a higher power that might be lurking behind the North American wasteland he's wandering. Its a totally unexpected moment, and it goes against the sort of staunch atheistic impulses that are tied to the laziest forms of spiritualism through commerce. Coupland's books have a strange magic to them, and they seem as essential to the past 20 years as any art I've encountered.
Declare Epithetical Books Life After God
| Title | : | Life After God |
| Author | : | Douglas Coupland |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | First Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 291 pages |
| Published | : | July 1st 2002 by Simon & Schuster (first published 1994) |
| Categories | : | Fiction. Short Stories. Cultural. Canada. Contemporary. Literature |
Rating Epithetical Books Life After God
Ratings: 3.79 From 11500 Users | 463 ReviewsCritique Epithetical Books Life After God
I read this first one summer long ago, sitting between jobs in a small apartment in Birmingham AL. That was a summer when I'd stay up all night reading or scanning through cable channels and go out to a breakfast buffet at a diner just before dawn and exchange aimless conversation with other people who weren't sleeping and had no daytime lives. Put simply--- I fell in love with the stories Coupland tells here. However not? I was in the same stories. Years later--- too many years later ---I stillMy favorite book of all time. Every now and again - like some post-modern Bible - I'm forced to read its words again. So much depth in (apparently) simple prose... Magnificent.Some of my favorite quotes from this book:And then sometimes I think the people to feel saddest for are people who once knew what profoundness was, but who lost or became numb to the sensation of wonder people who closed the doors that leads us into the secret world or who had the doors closed for them by time and
Tried re-reading this the other day, and I just couldn't get myself back into it. All that Meaning-with-a-capital-M that seemed to be there when I was in my late teens/early 20s seemed a bit absent, so I stopped before I could completely ruin my good memories of this book. It's best to let angsty dogs lie, I suppose.Come to think of it, maybe this is why I have such a hard time getting into a lot of Coupland's work that has come out since I graduated college. Maybe when you finally have some
One day later: Actually screw it this deserves five stars, I was hesitant because it's a harrowing experience to binge read the stories but they deserve all five. Also I forgot to mention that more than the gloom of OK Computer the stories reminded me of early Modest Mouse (pre-The Moon and Antarctica): there's driving on empty interstates and stuff, and the setting is the Pacific Northwest, and there's the sense of sadness with some sense that maybe, possibly, things could get better.This was
Just because of this, it's worth it:And then I felt sad because I realized that once people are broken in certain ways, they can't ever be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older as you see the people in your life break one by one. You wonder when your turn is going to be, or if it's already happened. Or this...We are changed souls; we don't look at things the same way anymore. For there was a time when we
A nostalgic trip down 90s lane (How 90s is this book? One of the stories is dedicated, without irony, to Michael Stipe of R.E.M., a rock band that was once the biggest in the world, of some renown and remains a major influence on the bands that influence the bands of today - like, remember ten years ago when MySpace was the new Athens, Georgia?) via a series of well-written, sometimes-sad and sometimes-humorous (i.e. well-balanced), short stories from the hand of the Original Voice of Generation
Super unique book. For sure going to revisit this one at some point in time.
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