Life after God, by Douglas Coupland
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Life after God, Douglas Coupland
When your world has fallen apart, how do you build a new one? Haunted by loss, each of the narrators in Life after God is driven to escape from the exhausted, ironic consumerism of life in the big city, heading into the small domestic spaces of Vancouver or the open highways of North America. Each is in search of small personal significances - desires and memories and affections - which can provide a new kind of truth in a culture stuck on fast-forward. A culture seemingly beyond God.
Comments:
(I'm not good at writing book reviews, but anyway here my feeble effort goes.)This is a book made up of a series of short stories, written by Coupland in different narrative voices in present tense. It's in plain, simple English and easy to stomach. Makes you think about the way you live. There are interesting bits such as:
"In art school a decade ago I learned that the best way to memorize a landscape is to close your eyes for several seconds and then blink in reverse."
The chapter that left the deepest impression on me was "Gettysburg", and below is an excerpt from the book.
Why is it so hard to quickly sum up all of those things that we have learned while being alive here on Earth? Why can’t I just tell you, “In ten minutes you are going to be hit by a bus, and so in those ten minutes you must quickly itemize what you have learned from being alive.”
Chances are that you would have a blank list. And even if you gave the matter great concentration, you would probably still have a blank list. And yet we know in our hearts that we learn the greatest and most profound things by breathing, by seeing, by feeling, by falling in and out and in and out of love.
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If anybody would like to read the entire chapter of Gettysburg, please do not hesitate to send me a PM.
