Only Human: A Comedy (Paperback)

Sarai's story is one of innocence tempered by longings that harden into a refusal to suffer fools gladly--and that includes Abram for his obedient faith in his God, as well as this quixotic God himself. In alternating voices this aggrieved, easily dumbfounded God speaks to us in the first person, admitting to being astounded by the inventiveness of humans, and foxed by their desire to become us, when what he has shown them is his eternal I am. Abram's and Sarai's trials and tribulations are many and great: shame and exile, desert wanderings, and, most terrible of all, Sarai's barrenness, which she accepts as "the way of the world", but Abram is consumed by the loss of his begetting. God, meantime, stamps and stomps, and peppers his watchfulness with what he learns from his humans until "I had my fill of mankind and its seething, fleshy, unreliable ways" and so decides that he will become "ahead of the game". What he hadn't bargained for was love--and the consequent desolations of loss. Becoming all too human, he wants to be loved by Abram, and is consumed by jealousy and revenge towards Sarai. He plots against Sarai but her machinations are a match for his. She organises the birth of Ishmael by Hagar; he orchestrates the birth of Isaac, and incidentally renames them Abraham and Sarah and then he tops it with: "The story's mine, not hers, never was. The interruption is the narrative, the interrupter is the narrator". But one wonders how it is that Sarah knew the story all along, passed down through generations of women.

Audaciously inventive and humanely rich in its observation of emotional tumult, although just occasionally this slips over into "emotional literacy" speech rather than nuance, Jenny Diski has done her story proud. --Ruth Petrie --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review
'Excellent, sexy novel... this book delves into all kinds of byways - infertility, obedience, autonomy in a relationship - with wit and intelligence.' MARIE CLAIRE 'a hugely engaging and entertaining book' SUNDAY EXPRESS 'both intimate and ambitious - not only human, but also divine' DAILY TELEGRAPH

There are three voices of interior monologue in this spare, metaphysical novel: Sarah, half-sister and wife of Abraham, whose feelings and thoughts are largely absent in the biblical narrative, is here reclaimed as a woman who has to endure her husband's 'God-craziness' without sharing his belief; then there is God, who by his very narration here, seems to need to explain just how his recalcitrant creatures forced him to learn about Imagination, Death and the Future. He emerges as anything but likeable, and his promises to Abraham are in the nature of a reckless lover's gifts, with unplanned consequences. The third voice is a somewhat mysterious authorial one. 'Only Human' is the title, and it is not only humans who graft many of the ancient sacrificial practices onto the worship of Abraham's new God who are 'only human', but God himself, who longs for love in an all too human way, so much so that he himself is tested when he commands the sacrifice of Isaac. Subtitled A Comedy, the book's very bitter joke is that there is finally only bleak disillusion for Sarah. Diski has not altered the bare bones of the biblical account, but has fleshed out Sarah's childhood longings, and her love for Abraham. Yet Abraham insisted on passing her off as his sister in a time of danger, and she was passed on the Pharaoh for his delight. When, after years of miserable childlessness, she bore a son, Isaac, she had to endure the horror of what Abraham, in obedience to a voice, had been prepared to do to their own son. No wonder 'her heart was turned to stone'. Diski's ingenuity is to mete out feminist justice by allowing Sarah a voice is an imaginative triumph, but the real challenge of her latest novel is in the addition of a bold and startling dimension - her invention of God's amoral explanations. (Kirkus UK)

The always intriguing Diski ("Skating to Antarctica", 1998, etc.) retells the Old Testament of Sarah and Abraham, creating both a moving love story and a postmodern exploration of the idea of narration. Child of an unnamed concubine and Abraham's father, Sarah is raised in the respectable house of Shem as a beloved sister. The family consists of prosperous craftsmen, fashioning idols of the various gods worshipped in the city of Ur. Even as a child Sarah loves Abraham, trailing after him in the pesky, devoted custom of a younger sibling. Then, when she's 13, tragedy strikes: Abraham's brother desecrates a temple and commits suicide, forcing his shunned family to move through the desert in search of a place that hasn't heard of their shame. While in the desert the father makes a daring decision: Sarah and Abraham must marry to continue the family line. They have a long, happy union but no children. It is then that God speaks to Abraham, promising the impossible: children through which a nation will be born. Throughout Sarah's story, the voice of God interrupts-although, as He points out, He is The Word, so there is no narrative that is not His own. These forays into divine elevate a simple revisionist tale to a truly bold exploration of the character of God. The great "I AM "from which everything comes, God tells of his first mistake, the unforeseen invention of an "us" (Adam and Eve): it's a mistake that sets Him forever apart from His creation. An "us" doesn't need an "I AM", and the human invention of love, something He never imagined, further alienates master from man and woman. God tries to start over with Noah, but it doesn't really work, so He then sets His sights on stolid, dutiful Abraham's love. But there's a powerful obstacle: the love already existing between a very human "us"-Sarah and Abraham. Original and thought-provoking. (Kirkus Reviews)

See all Product Description

• Books > Fiction > Authors, A-Z > D > Diski, Jenny
• Books > Fiction > By Period

• Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
• I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
• I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.