Oh yeah, the religious stuff in The Brothers Karamazov drove me crazy. "Come on, can't you shut up about god and get back to the murder?!!?!?"
Gilead is an interesting question though. Until this moment I don't think I had given any thought to why the religious elements of that book don't bother me. Part of it, I suppose, is that Gilead seems to be about a lot of other things in addition to being about faith: family and history and place and voice and.... Whereas The Heart of the Matter was disappointing because at first it WAS about a lot of different and interesting things, until suddenly it was just all Catholicism all the time. And of course Robinson handles it all must more subtly than Greene does. In Gilead, the character's faith feels totally organic to the narrative, as opposed to Greene's approach which basically amounts to a church falling out of the sky and crushing his characters, leaving just their feet sticking out like the wicked witch of the east.
Anyway, that's an interesting question that probably bears more thinking about, but this is already getting a bit long... :)
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Date: 2013-04-22 08:01 pm (UTC)Gilead is an interesting question though. Until this moment I don't think I had given any thought to why the religious elements of that book don't bother me. Part of it, I suppose, is that Gilead seems to be about a lot of other things in addition to being about faith: family and history and place and voice and.... Whereas The Heart of the Matter was disappointing because at first it WAS about a lot of different and interesting things, until suddenly it was just all Catholicism all the time. And of course Robinson handles it all must more subtly than Greene does. In Gilead, the character's faith feels totally organic to the narrative, as opposed to Greene's approach which basically amounts to a church falling out of the sky and crushing his characters, leaving just their feet sticking out like the wicked witch of the east.
Anyway, that's an interesting question that probably bears more thinking about, but this is already getting a bit long... :)