THE BOOK OF STRANGE NEW THINGS – Michel Faber Rating: 5/5
“We’re the aliens here.”
In a not so distant future, Father Peter Leigh is sent on a deep space mission to a new planetary settlement ‘Oasis’ as a Christian minister, even though all the human settlers on Oasis are atheists. Father Peter is appointed as a pastor not for the humans but for the native Oasans, the Jesus loving aliens who have demanded for a priest as a trade deal. Despite the science fiction premise which can be misleading as genre fiction, THE BOOK OF STRANGE NEW THINGS (that’s what the native Oasans call The Bible) is a literary fiction of the highest order, a mesmerizing, atmospheric rumination on faith, philosophy, alienation and despair. Faber crafts the most articulate, exquisite sentences and makes them seem breezy. The brilliance of Faber’s syntax is so dazzling and intimidating, it reminds the reader (that’s me) of his own pathetic linguistic inabilities. Thematically too the book is on point, dissecting the gradual departure of faith followed by a hollow, jaded guilt. Exceptional book. And the cover art! This is going straight to the favorite list.
[Michel Faber is a Dutch author who writes in English. His debut novel UNDER THE SKIN was adapted as a brilliant feature film starring Scarlett Johansson. THE BOOK OF STRANGE NEW THINGS is his final novel, as Faber declared.]
Even at 41, I knew I looked stunning. Other than the crow feet in my eyes and the sag in my breasts, both of which I magically concealed with an army of cosmetics and wire-bras, my age didn’t sabotage me. I was still a head turner, a darling of the male gaze, even of boys as young as my son. Back when we started to date, Dark would describe me with the help of a two liner: ‘What is more dangerous than a beautiful woman? A beautiful woman who knows she is beautiful!’ Dark was observant. He knew beauty was on my side and that I used its power to the fullest. Of all the lifelong misfortunes I had to endure, a lack of good looks wasn’t one. Even at my most ugly early morning avatar, with puffy eyes and scraggy hair I could make a man skip a heartbeat. Very early in my life I learned the unfair advantage of beauty which the philosophers had known for ages. I knew I was that rara avis that poets called Goddess. Beauty was my high value currency. But like Helen of Troy and Draupadi of Mahabharata, beauty was also my nemesis.
If Dark was here he would tell you how beauty was counted as an ultimate value. How, in philosophy, it represented the goodness of things, the virtue of beings, the value of truth, the nature of justice, even the brightness of light itself. He would say beauty was the primary element of all artistic and philosophical work since ancient history, be it Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Greek, Hellenistic or the medieval, that the renaissance was founded on the principles of beauty called aesthetics. Modern thinkers like Hume, Burke, Kant, Shchiller, Hegel, Schopenhauer, all investigated beauty in their philosophical inquiry of human nature. True, there was a sharp decline of beauty in the modern and postmodern era of the twentieth century. Cubism, Dadaism and the infamous Abstract Art took human aesthetics to previously unexplored regions. But, he would argue, those only professed a new definition of beauty: the anti-beauty. For Dark, beauty did exist, notoriously ‘in the eyes of the beholder’. You see, beauty was Dark’s religion and I was his Goddess.
Dark saw beauty as an open invitation for adventure. Years later, when I saw Mona Lisa in the Louvre I knew what he meant. I was shocked to see how small the painting really was. It was puny, encased in a two by three feet gilded frame. Minuscule in comparison to the thousands of other massive paintings housed at the Louvre. And yet you couldn’t take your eyes of her…the ever elusive La Giaconda. Millions of people flocked to the museum just to catch a glimpse of her. If the Louvre was a treasure island then Leonardo’s masterpiece was the pirate’s call that made you set sail for an unforgettable treasure hunt: the Raphaels, the Caravaggios, the Vermeers, the Titians, the Delacroixes.
~ An excerpt from BLACK MILK my work-in-progress fiction.
raenegade 