| The Davinci Code -- Day 4 |
[Oct. 14th, 2007|06:47 pm] |
You may notice a few days got skipped here.
I had a master plan. I was going to describe my struggles, document the world's worst character description and suddenly cut off my posts in mid-thought to talk about something completely different.
But the truth is, I've been defeated. Utterly, totally and completed. I cannot read another sentence of this book.
It wasn't the terrible writing. It was the laughable idea of pacing. Neither was it the totally ignorant presentation of the Catholic church, past and present, art history, European history, cryptography, symbolism in art and life, academic life and pre-Christian religions of the world.
It was the fact that the protagonist knew the Big Secret, in fact had just finished a book about the Big Secret, in which he had cited the work of other people who knew the Big Secret, and had apparently done all this completely unmolested by the church who had reportedly been going around murdering people for centuries for daring to suggest the Big Secret was true. He had enough information from the opening pages that he could have turned to whoever was closest and said "So, why is the curator of the Louvre using his last breath to point out that Mary Magdalene married Jesus and had a kid by him? Pretty much everybody in the symbology community knows that." (That last sentance would be making a pretty average outrageous claim about the nature of that community). The surprise revelation of this book? It was a twenty page short story masquerading as a novel.
In addition to the most elementary of plotting, there was something else this book lacked that really got under my skin.
There was no God. This was about the nature of divinity and the history of religion and the Catholic church, but there was no God nor discussion of the nature or existence of God. It was asserted that one of the main protagonists was a direct descended of Jesus Christ but we were not going to stop for a moment to think about what this said about the nature of reality or divinity or the hearafter.
And finally, none of it mattered. There was, as I said, no God anywhere in evidence, and of course since it was decided that the whole thing had to be kept a secret anyway so that people would keep striving to try to find it out and thus become better human beings for it (except the ones murdered by the Catholic Church for striving to find it out, I guess), so by the end of the book, nothing had changed. SO WHY AM I SUPPOSED TO CARE ABOUT ANY OF THIS?
So, as I say. I am defeated. The book won, hands down. I admit it. I retreated to read a very good Romance novel and was much happier for it. |
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| Comments: |
I guess you can only hold your nose so long when swimming in an outhouse.
You know, actually I enjoyed much more the movie "The body" with Antonio Banderas than this book as for that aspect. http://www.amazon.com/Body-Antonio-Banderas/dp/B00005JD5M/ref=pd_bbs_8/105-9929963-1065212?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1192532966&sr=8-8I thought taht the movie at least was making oneself think and ask questions about 'what if Jesus was just a normal man and did not resurrect but died like everyone else?'. It was opening for me a whole world of possibilities. I'm not saying that the movie is a wonderful one (although I enjoyed it a lot) but it was a pretty good one and the presence of 'God' was something more 'palpable' or 'real' than in Davinci Code. I mostly expected something like that with Davinci Code book and that it would arise questions about Jesus life or behavior, but it isn't at all helping or worth reading for that 'aspect'.
Interesting. The one I'd like to see along this line is JESUS OF MONTREAL, which is about a guy attempting to put on a play about what the actual life of a fully human, historical Jesus might have been. It is apparently well done enough that some video chains won't carry it.
Being banned is always a hallmark of quality, IMHO.
Funny because that's what's on tv tonight... in France. Definitely knew I read about it somewhere. heh.
If you watched it, I'd be interested to know what you thought of it.
Yes I watched it and I really enjoyed it a lot. I'm not too fond of Canadian movies usely but this one was particularly interesting. And the actors were really good too. I especially loved the parallele made between Jesus's life and the 'main' actor's life, I can't enter into details here because I don't want to spoil it for you, -although everybody knows how it ends (like they say in the movie) but that was really really brilliant how they did that. It makes you think and to me, it is really 'faithfull' to Jesus and his life and his message. Even if I'm not particularly religious myself. But that's my idea of what religion should be like.
So go rent it without hesitating, it's a must see movie.
Oh and you might be very surprised in the beggining but keep on watching. It's really worth.
Thanks for the review. I'll add it to my Netflix queue.
One of the things you're saying sounds particularly important. Maybe I'm just thriller-deficient somehow, but one of the things that drove me particularly nuts about the DaVinci Code was that here we were going on and on and ON about how the "sacred feminine" was SOOO important and SOOO dangerous that the Evil Catholic Church (the only branch of Christianity to venerate women in any form) was murdering people to stomp it out, and yet we did not stop for a single moment to consider what is the actual nature of divinity, or the soul, or even goodness, except that it's clearly really bad to be French, unless you're descended from Jesus. | |
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