Quarantine
Ratings7
Average rating4
A re-imagining of the forty days Christ spent in the wilderness being tempted by the devil.
Judea, about two thousand years ago: There were five of them - not in a group, but strung out along the road where earlier that morning the caravan of uncles had passed by. Three men, a woman, and, too far behind for anyone to guess its gender, a fifth. And this fifth was barefoot, and without a staff. No water-skin, or bag of clothes. No food.
A slow, painstaking figure, made thin and watery by the rising, mirage heat, as if someone had thrown a stone into the pool of air through which it walked and ripples had diluted it.
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A beautiful and in-depth imagining of a handful of random Middle Easterners who have each come to the desert for their own reasons and with their own burdens—one of whom just happening to be Jesus, who is cast as an almost psychotic outsider to both the group and the book. Dazzling. For this, John Updike called Crace “a writer of hallucinatory skill.”
This was a powerful and thought provoking book about compassion and suffering. While it is set during Jesus' fasting in the desert, the narrative focuses more on the other people in the same area and their struggles and dreams. I especially liked the interactions between the women Miri and Marta.
