- Paperback: 320 pages
- Publisher: No Exit Press; Special edition edition (6 Jan 1999)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 1901982165
- ISBN-13: 978-1901982169
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 5,370,363 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Publishers Weekly
"This dense, allegorical novel rigorously moves through an unfamiliar, labyrinthine dystopia ... Biblical references, imaginative riffs on academic deconstruction and a bleak futuristic vision add a literary flair to this dark tale."
Jonathan Carroll, author of Kissing the Beehive
"Word Made Flesh made the hair stand up on the back of my mind. Dark, cunning, and wickedly clever, it outsmarts you at just about every turn. Terrific stuff."
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First Sentence
You are hearing the screams of a small, fat man. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
You are hearing the screams of a small, fat man. Read the first page
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Remakable. Truely remakable. Imagine Lovecraft and Kafka writing a crime novel and you are *still* not close. A truely remakable effort.
The book starts rather abruptly with a very graphic description of a man being skinned alive. It is a beautifully written piecem carefully, almost *lovingly* crafted; like a love poem. But it is still a detailed description of a man being skinned alive....
If you think you can stomach it, then reading this book will reward your efforts. It is many stroies wowen into one, the whole somehow being much greater than the parts.
There is the story of Gilrein, an ex-cop and now independet taxi driver who is being chased and beaten up repeatedly for a book he doesn't know. This is pure, if very noir, crime fiction. There are the memories of the Holocaust. There are the lifes of the people in Quinsigamon, including the Inspector, the Magicians, the cops and the crooks (and they are often the same).
All storys wowen together, all sorries about the word. Think John 1: "In the beginning was the Word. The Word became flesh and lived among us." This book is (also) about the power of words, how they define and shape reality, and how reality is not just words but something bigger. God can not be defined or experienced with words alone.
A great read. Highly recommended. Read the Gospel According to John first.
2 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Jack O'Connell is one of my favorite writers. He takes real chances with this work and brings the reader to places they might not want, but need to go.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
I read this book up to page 214, where I stopped. What was the point in continuing after learning that the 'hero', Gilrein's ideology is precisely the same as that of the bad guys? How can I believe in a hero who has no ethical stance at all? They said that WORD MADE FLESH was 'Blade runner as imagined by Kafka' - it makes me wonder whether that reviewer ever actually read Philip K. Dick. BLADE RUNNER has some fresh, imaginative and profound insights on the human condition and what it is to be human. WORD MADE FLESH has none, only the tired old sub-capitalist cliche that 'man is born evil': if that is the case, which it isn't, then the gangsters in WORD are right to do what they do, because they can't help it, and the hero has no case. For your information, Mr. O'Connell: there is absolutely no scientific proof that 'the ability to harm others is forever written into our DNA'. In fact, the Seville Statement, in 1986, signed by 20 top biologists, concluded that, though violent behaviour occurs, 'it is scientifically incorrect to say that man has an inherited tendency to make war or act violently. That behaviour is not genetically programmed into human nature'. As for there being multiple instances of destructive behaviour for every creative one,your timeline sample is a tad narrow: our ancestors were hunter-gatherers for 200,000 years and never, as far as we know, fought a war or committed an atrocity. Haven't you ever considered the possibility that it just might be our social and economic system that's up the creek, rather than our DNA? Imagination? Sorry - I personally need more than some pretentiously flowery prose to convince me, more than some battered old establishment doctrine, more than comic strip done up as a detective novel. Do we really need books like this? I read in one of O'Connell's bios that he considers himself 'the world's biggest square' . Well, need one say more?
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