September 27th, 2010 / 1:49 pm
Snippets
Snippets
Alexis Orgera—
Does anyone have suggestions for good fictional, alternative narratives of Jesus’s life? I’ve read and liked Jim Crace’s Quarantine and Jose Saramago’s The Gospel According to Jesus Christ.
Didn’t Norman Mailer take a crack at that?
The Last Temptation of Christ / Nikos Kazantzakis
The Gospel According to the Son by Norman Mailer.
Barabbas by Par Lagerkvist. Picks up immediately after Barabbas’ release and follows him through despair and self-doubt as he wanders around wondering why he was allowed to live instead of the other guy. He does some research on Jesus until the Christians find out who he is. Short and bleak and pretty awesome.
I thought Toby Olson’s Life of Jesus did the re-telling well. He’s not as well-known a poet or novelist as he could be.
It’s maybe not exactly what you’re looking for, but in Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut does a very brief retelling/reinterpretation of the Gospels and their meaning.
I seem to remember Harry Mathews’s story “County Cooking from Central France” having a last supper subtext. I had to look up the subtitle to get it right: “Roast Boned Rolled Stuffed Shoulder of Lamb (Farce Double).
this one, yes.
Behold the Man by Michael Moorcock
Blood Meridian (hint: he’s The Judge)
Didn’t Norman Mailer take a crack at that?
The Master and Margherita by Bulgakov
Robert Graves
How’s it compare to the movie?
How do you figure the Judge is Jesus? A Demiurge maybe. Maybe Lucifer, although that is a stretch. But I do not see a lot of Christ in the Judge.
A classic.
Heather O’Neill’s “The Gospel According to Mary M of Cartier Elementary” …
http://www.cbc.ca/wiretap/episode/
Season 4, scroll down to “The Two Mary’s” forward to 11 minutes and 20 seconds.
That’s the one where Mailer later said he was hiding how smart he was. Not my favorite book.
Reynolds Price did two translations, one of Mark and one of John, and also wrote his own apocryphal gospel, “An Honest Account of a Memorable Life.” I took a class with him last semester where we read the translations and then wrote our own gospels, but we didn’t actually read his—I think it hews pretty closely to the canonical gospels in its content, with a different sort of execution. But yeah, I ended up getting to write an 11,000-word apocryphal gospel, which was a pretty wild experience. For credit.
The Gospel of Corax by Paul Park.
Lamb by Christopher Moore. It’s funny, but also sort of terrible.
The Good Man Jesus and The Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman
Movie: Jesus of Montreal. Book(play) : The Lizard if Tarsus by Jim Grimsley.
ok
Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ
Thanks, everyone! This might have to be a summer project after all, but I’ve got a good reading list…
I remember thinking Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore was really funny and good when I read it
Little bit of a tangent: a review I wrote of a Continuum title ‘Contemporary Fiction and Christianity’ which pulls a number of other things into the orbit of Bible-thinking. The review is at the bottom of this page: http://throwyourlaptopdownthestairs.blogspot.com/search/label/TLS
Less of a tangent is Philip Pullman’s ‘The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ’, which was a good idea not all that well executed.
“really funny” and “good”
Daniel Johnston’s Hi, How Are You.
Convoy with Kris Kristofferson.