And the Ass Saw the Angel | Nick Cave | Vivid, intense allegories, rain, plague, ingenious killer...

And the Ass Saw the Angel | Nick Cave | A Staggering work of genius!

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	And the Ass Saw the Angel Nick Cave 2.13.61, 2003 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 68 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Cave?s only novel to date takes on the southern gothic in this bizarre baroque tale. Born mute to a drunken mother and a demented father, tortured Euchrid Eucrow finds more compassion in the family mule than in his fellow men. But he alone will grasp the cruel fate of Cosey Mo, the beautiful young prostitute in the pink caravan on Hooper?s Hill. And it is Euchrid, spiraling ever deeper into his mad angelic vision, who will ultimately redeem both the town and its people.

Vivid, intense allegories, rain, plague, ingenious killer traps and the amazing innocence of youth

Book alive with vivid, intense biblical allegories told in first part in a rain-plagued dark world of desperation, cruelty and ignorance as seen through the eyes of a young misfit. As the men of the town club to death the whore-become-martyr, they in turn find she is pregnant with all their children, and as the angelic child is born, the rains end. Thus begins part two. And the Ass Saw the Angel is a book about transfiguration and cruelty in a world of desperation that one day experiences light. It is about the innocence of childhood and innocence lost; about abandonment and atonement.

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A Staggering work of genius!

It is grotesque and difficult to read (some will tell you it could have been edited a little better and is full of typos). However, this is part of the books brilliance; narrated as it is by an illiterate mute. Whether deliberate or not on Cave's part, I thought it worked nonetheless.

Euchrid's (The protagonist) bile, anger and contempt vomits forth onto the page through a guttural, almost unintelligible Deep South narration; as cold, bitter and unkind as the world he inhabits. This is good old fashioned fire and brimstone. Themes from the Old Testament (and some New T.) run through the narrative of the book, with strong influences from Milton's Paradise Lost and Dante's Divine Comedy, all screamed at you by an angry street preacher in the vein of Ian Paisley.

Given the location for the story, comparisons with Faulkner have and will be made. However, to cast off Cave's book as a mere Faulkner imitation does not do justice to the complexity of the story, the writing or the work of either author. Cave's writing style paints a vivid picture of hell, exposes and lays bare the prejudices and hypocrisies of book's townfolk and builds to a crescendo of the righteous vengeance visited upon them

If you like your religious motifs delivered in an easy Hollywood fashion, you would probably be better off with a Dan Brown novel.

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a cultural touchstone

Mr. Cave achieves the almost impossible in this work: not insulting the reader. Take the most common literary comparisons, O'Connor and Faulkner, and there's something vital missing, and I'm certain that is J. M. Coetzee, specifically "the life and times of michael k." A masterwork of obscurity, this character study is solid, consistent, and worthy of any handy yardstick. It's conveniently impossible to empathize with Euchrid, and the discipline it took to pull this off is greater than it's given credit for; Cave jumps into the deep end in this anonymously southern novel without a life preserver, and the narrative bobs and lurches to survive drowning in filth and hatred to great effect.

The only reason I give this book five stars rather than four is that a major plot point is left delightfully unclear at the last second.

--spoiler follows: avert thine eyes--

Did Euchrid have sex with Beth or did she get pregnant by some other means?

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Language that gets lost in itself

Some stunning language, beautiful descriptions, but the storyline itself suffered for it. First person novels told from the mind of mentally deteriorating protagonists tend to unravel this way.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

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