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    Gods Without Men
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    Gods Without Men
    Unavailable
    Gods Without Men
    Audiobook14 hours

    Gods Without Men

    Written by Hari Kunzru

    Narrated by Rupert Degas, Kate Harper and Lorelei King

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Winner of the Betty Trask Prize and W.H. Smith Literary Award, novelist Hari Kunzru displays a rare and blazing talent. Gods Without Men is a complex, multilayered work centered on a young couple whose son goes missing during a vacation in the Mojave Desert. Searching for their missing child—and for meaning—husband and wife are drawn to a remote town, where they encounter an eclectic group that includes a British rock star and a U.S. Marine.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books Audio
    Release dateJan 1, 2012
    ISBN9781464038297
    Unavailable
    Gods Without Men
    Author

    Hari Kunzru

    Hari Kunzru is the author of six novels: White Tears, Gods Without Men, My Revolutions, Transmission, The Impressionist, and his latest, Red Pill. His work has been translated into twenty-one languages, and his short stories and articles have appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, The Guardian, and The New Yorker. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Public Library, and the American Academy in Berlin. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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    Reviews for Gods Without Men

    3.5/5

    147 ratings11 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Gods without men is an interconnecting set of stories that take place in the Mojave Desert in Southern California. The title is taken from a quote by Balzac that in the desert there is everything and nothing; "It is God without men." The novel takes form and substance when people enter the desert with a variety of motivations and states of consciousness searching for personal meaning.The timeline starts in 1947 and moves erratically forward to 2009 and back to 1775 developing the idea that people have been attracted to the desert by mystical "signs" of alien beings in the desert rocks, utopian societies, tales of "spiritual" awakenings, and the means to escape from themselves. Some of the characters who are searching include a WWII veteran, an Iraqi Goth teenager, US Marines, culturally enclosed Native Americans, burned out rockers, drug dealers/users with tombstones in their eyes, hippie dropouts, paranoid ranchers, and members of an American family with a Muslim father, Jewish mother, and autistic son seeking deliverance from their fate.The desert provides vast spaces for these disparate characters to act out their existential dilemmas, trying to find meaning in gods, sand, and rock to problems of their own making. They all come to realize that their consciousness is individual and awareness often leads to despair. They perceive projections of unconscious desires and unexplained phenomena in barren locations as evidence of potentially positive supernatural intervention. Ultimately, the characters have to find their own meaning inside themselves, not through isolation, but by interacting with and accepting other people's personally valid conception of existence.Hari Kunzru's novel is apparently rambling in structure, but the lives of key characters overlap and intersect in states of consciousness and concrete events shared across the centuries and millennia in the desert. Although the search for meaning is a solitary proces, it is facilitated by the perceptions of kindred spirits and the mystique of the vast and, in human perception, limitless time and area of the the desert. And, given the limitations of their percetions, there are some phenomena in the land of gods without men that cannot be resolved with dialectic.
    • 4/5
      Bottom line, God's without Men is an excellent read. Well written, compelling, intelligent, and thought provoking. It leads one to consider relationships, spirituality, parenting, history and ultimately the grey areas of reality itself. If you're hung up with easy resolutions, conclusive plots, and simple answers, this isn't a book for you. Not a "literary" work but that's not its intent. Well worth the reading and pondering experience.
    • 4/5
      Gods without men is an interconnecting set of stories that take place in the Mojave Desert in Southern California. The title is taken from a quote by Balzac that in the desert there is everything and nothing; "It is God without men." The novel takes form and substance when people enter the desert with a variety of motivations and states of consciousness searching for personal meaning.The timeline starts in 1947 and moves erratically forward to 2009 and back to 1775 developing the idea that people have been attracted to the desert by mystical "signs" of alien beings in the desert rocks, utopian societies, tales of "spiritual" awakenings, and the means to escape from themselves. Some of the characters who are searching include a WWII veteran, an Iraqi Goth teenager, US Marines, culturally enclosed Native Americans, burned out rockers, drug dealers/users with tombstones in their eyes, hippie dropouts, paranoid ranchers, and members of an American family with a Muslim father, Jewish mother, and autistic son seeking deliverance from their fate.The desert provides vast spaces for these disparate characters to act out their existential dilemmas, trying to find meaning in gods, sand, and rock to problems of their own making. They all come to realize that their consciousness is individual and awareness often leads to despair. They perceive projections of unconscious desires and unexplained phenomena in barren locations as evidence of potentially positive supernatural intervention. Ultimately, the characters have to find their own meaning inside themselves, not through isolation, but by interacting with and accepting other people's personally valid conception of existence.Hari Kunzru's novel is apparently rambling in structure, but the lives of key characters overlap and intersect in states of consciousness and concrete events shared across the centuries and millennia in the desert. Although the search for meaning is a solitary proces, it is facilitated by the perceptions of kindred spirits and the mystique of the vast and, in human perception, limitless time and area of the the desert. And, given the limitations of their percetions, there are some phenomena in the land of gods without men that cannot be resolved with dialectic.
    • 5/5
      If you’ve ever wandered near enough to a true wilderness and felt the impersonal man-crushing power that is raw nature you might understand why the characters in Gods Without Men cannot untangle themselves from their desert geography. I found this novel fascinating in a way few modern books are. That it can successfully speak on multiple levels of human psychology, spirituality, philosophy, and sociology while ingeniously avoiding most of the pitfalls inherent such an ambitious project is impressive. I found this to be an excellent novel that lingers in my mind weeks after I’ve put it down.
    • 4/5
      This was mind expanding literature, it’s got my brain going round in a whirl. Vast in scale, it centres its action around a distinctive rock formation in the Californian desert, but flips backwards and forwards in time, covering almost 250 years in total. Characters come from a vast array of cultures. It’s hard to pin down exactly what it’s about, except to say that perhaps it’s about everything, and the way that everything is connected to everything else.Skilfully written, the book’s chapters mostly follow the same formula – plunging straight into the action without any explanation of who the characters, where they are or what is going on. Nothing other than the date. Puzzlement is allowed to tick over to within a nanosecond of irritation before the author lays out the backstory, in the manner of a poker player revealing his hand, and everything falls into place, including the ways in which characters’ stories intersect across the time line. I’m going to admit that I found the chapters taking place prior to 1947 tough going; on the other hand the modern day stories were totally gripping, and in the end you need those earlier stories to form a coherent whole.
    • 4/5
      I really enjoyed this book. I found it hard to get into, but am so glad I stuck with it because by about 100 pages, I was totally hooked. The main story is set in the present. A young autistic boy is lost in the dessert during a family vacation. In this dessert is a pinnacle rock, with three "fingers" reaching to the sky. And around this landmark, over more than 300 years, people and animals have lived. Their stories are interwoven and together build a narrative about life. This is a story about faith, about seeking a purpose for all the wonder and tragedy that is life. It is about the need to understand how the world works. And about how we can never fully answer these kinds of questions.The writing is very good, with the multiple voices over a vast time period all ringing true. The story is deep and complex but never hard to follow. Very well done!
    • 4/5
      Just as an aside: I was puzzled by those who found little connection in the different time frames in this novel. Early on the book readily reminded me of Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, where I found the connections to be very tenuous or for that matter non-existent, whereas here the overriding constant of The Pinnacles plus oftentimes the same characters was more than enough to bind everything together.
    • 4/5
      "Only connect," as E.M. Forster wrote in Howards End, to "live in fragments no more" is a wish that's appears to be a plea against the fractured, chaotic and constantly in motion life in the 21st century First World. Hari Kunzru's fourth novel, Gods Without Men, is written in fragments of different times and places, but there are slender threads connecting them to each other. Whether the reader makes those connections and feels the fabric of a novel depends on the reader. And we all know we readers are not cut from the same cloth.The novel is about both the trickster known as Coyote and the world of humans, those foible-filled creatures. In a way, Gods Without Men is as much a myth as novel, in that Coyote has set up and been caught in a trap in which humans are involved. During diferent eras, there is the inference that if one creature escapes, another must take its place (there is a similar story in Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell that ended up being surprisingly poignant).But that is the underpinning of the various stories contained within Kunzru's book. The main narratives are of a modern New York couple whose autistic son disappears for a few months while they are out West strolling around the Three Pinnacles rock formation out in the midst of the desert, a group in the late 1950s who seek wisdom from an alien race and a commune seeking wisdom from drugs as much as the aliens. There are connections between these stories, and a few others, that are not forced but which give few hints of how it all might tie together. The main characters in all of these narratives are well-rounded portraits with compelling storylines. Jaz Matharu is a second-generation American who has given up Sikh ways and used his mad math skills to help develop a financial market software program, Walter, that would recognize 2001: A Space Odyssey's Hal as kin. His wife, Lisa, is a lapsed Jew who gives up her publishing job after it's apparent their son, Raj, suffers from serious autism. Kunzru is adept at letting the reader see how they both got to the ratty desert motel where they stay just before Raj disappears. Kunzru also does both characters the service of letting the reader see their lives from their individual points of view. Neither is the villian. Neither is without fault. And it would be fascinating to discover what happens to them after the novel closes. The sections where they are in limbo when Raj disappears are haunting.Another child goes missing in the late 1950s. Joanie is searching for life to mean something when she discovers the writings of a scientific crackpot who thinks he is communicating with more intelligent beings from outer space. She becomes part of a group following him, living out in the desert near the Three Pinnacles. Joanie, an innocent, loses track of her young daughter, Judy.Years later, in the late 1960s and early 70s, Joanie, Judy (with definite ties to Raj's story) and Dawn, a girl from town, all end up at the commune near Three Pinnacles which took the place of the earlier group seeking wisdom from the stars. They've got a wild man, Coyote, who may or may not be the trickster. But he's definitely a snake in the garden figure. As with the other narratives, Dawn's story would make a complete novel on its own. Seeing her at different stages of her life only reinforces this feeling.Another story is woven into the narrative of how Raj comes back that does not quite have the feel of a complete story but one that is among the most moving in the novel. Laila is a young woman who has come from Iraq to California and then to the Three Pinnacles area to live in a constructed village. It was built by the military to be a fake Iraq for troops on their way over. Laila's story has everything -- a haven of childhood bliss, fear, secrecy, war, tragic loss and escape without the sense of a fresh, new beginning. But within the narrative, she has a role to play that puts her own story in the background. On the surface, there is enough about Laila that her tale holds together.However, Kunzru weaves hints into her story that show it could have been a sprawling epic on its own, telling the stories of Iraquis in various parts of society back home and here, as well as their life in a strange land and the people they encounter. When a soldier lets Laila wear night goggles to watch an evening training, the reality of what most of us have only seen on the news comes into clear focus.Reading this section was like a sucker punch, especially with the pressures Laila also faces from her older relatives that have taken in her and her brother. They're strangers here in ways that not even the white men trying to fit in with the tribes they encounter in other parts of the book are. Jaz has something of the same problem. He doesn't feel he fits in anywhere any longer, certainly not with his traditional-bound family and not with Lisa, even though both feel grief and guilt over their son's disappearance.The individual pieces in the novel, and the connection of various characters either looking beyond themselves for wisdom or having a search forced on them as they weave in and out of time, is worth reading. But the stories of strangers not at home in their worlds could have been an even stronger tale, one not relying on tricks or the trickster.
    • 3/5
      Kunzru’s assured novel wanders back and forth in time, following several groups of the lost as they seek something more or better for themselves. Where their stories all collide eventually is the Pinnacles, three fingers of stone projecting up out of the Mojave Desert. Among the wide cast of characters are Fray Garces, a half-insane Jesuit missionary intent on conveting the natives; Deighton, a scarred and arrogant ethnologist attempting to study the culture of the native tribes before it is lost entirely; dissolute British rock star Nicky Capaldi; the members of a hippie commune, including their “Guide,” Judy; and several others. But the core of the novel is formed by the experiences of Jaz, an assimilated American Sikh; his white American wife Lisa; and their four-year-old son Raj, who has autism. When Raj vanishes in the desert, near the Pinnacles, Jaz and Lisa become the center of a media storm. Kunzru’s portait of their marriage is nuanced and insightful; his descriptions of Jaz and his family’s life as immigrants always slightly out of step with American culture even more so. Complex, layered, lively, and intelligent, Kunzru has crafted an astute and piercing portrait of humanity’s continual quest for meaning—whether through religion, science, drugs, computer programming, or extraterrestrial life—amid the chaos of every day life.
    • 4/5
      Wow. This is some book! I loved how challenging it was, though I have to admit that I was a little disappointed that the ending left one very big question hanging. Shouldn't have been surprised, though: it was not the sort of book in which everything gets neatly worked out.
    • 5/5
      A set of stories orbiting a mystical vortex in the American desert, going back more than two centuries, though mostly in recent times. Apparitions, hallucinations, higher beings or the possibility of higher beings, coyotes, the incommensurability of different cultures and experiences, and the inscrutability of the desert.