Word: novelized
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...shipwreck, a tiger, and God connected? All play a major part in Yann Martel’s Booker Prize winning novel, “Life of Pi.” Nearly nine years after the publication of his runaway success, Martel sits down with FM on a sunny afternoon at the First Unitarian Church in Harvard Square to discuss his new book, his résumé, President Obama, and religion...
Goldstein’s novel flits between two storylines in the life of affable academic Cass Seltzer, one in his present, the other in his past. Presently, Seltzer is contemplating an offer to assume a post at Harvard University, having achieved unexpected fame with his book, “The Varieties of Religious Illusion.” The combination of this secularist tract—and its appendix refuting 36 arguments for God’s existence—with Cass’s clear-eyed empathy for religious belief has turned him into an overnight celebrity, dubbed by Time...
...story is not entirely an intellectual adventure. Throughout the novel, Goldstein uses playful, everyday occurrences to creatively broach serious topics, deftly interweaving such diverse concepts as probability theory, the mind-body problem, and theodicy with Cass’s relationship issues and dinner conversations. Of course, innumerable thinkers over many centuries haven’t definitively solved the problem of evil, and Goldstein isn’t going to do it over dessert, but she does succeed in accessibly introducing a classic conundrum to her audience in the flow of her storytelling. So long as readers recognize that the positions...
...community—all of which make this a far more elegant and effective work than any new atheist polemic—“36 Arguments for the Existence of God” still simplifies its subject, and so falls short of meeting its own ambitious standards. A novel that considers rational religionists and non-materialists on their own terms, while maintaining its strong intellectual reservations, would make a worthy sequel to this excellent but incomplete entry into the genre...
Referencing Viswanathan’s novel in one of the 618 numbered vignettes that constitutes “Reality Hunger,” Shields reveals his disappointment at the media’s smear-campaign against the young author, then a Harvard sophomore: “Excuse me, but isn’t the entire publishing industry built on telling the exact same stories over and over again?” he asks. “I don’t feel any of the guilt normally attached to ‘plagiarism,’ which seems...