Review written for ClubReading.com by Bill

Gods Go Begging is a wonderful novel about Jesse Pasadoble, a Vietnam veteran, now working as a defense attorney in San Francisco. A couple of current cases draw Jesse into a remarkable world of coincidence and ties to the past.

This book has a great story, full of twists and turns, a cacophony of emotion. Amplifying these amazing images, Alfredo Vea’s writing style is strong, poetic, lyrical, and at times magical. The struggles of the main character and his dealing with extraordinary events in his past lead us into weaving, dreamlike worlds.

The author sets the stage in one of the most memorable book openings I’ve ever read:

For a time, they both held on to their lives, gasping softly, whispering feverishly, and bleeding profusely, their two minds far, far away from the cruel, burrowing bullets that had left them mere seconds away from death. Face to face, they spoke their last words in crimson-colored breaths. Theirs was a withering language, one for which there are no living speakers.

Then, like warriors abandoned on the field, they lay in unearthly calm as the things of life deserted them. They had seen the mad commotion boiling in the air above them. In bemused silence, they heard the alarms, the screams, and the growing wail of sirens. Pronounced dead on a cold city sidewalk, they held on to each other as the gurney rolled from the cement to asphalt and into a waiting ambulance for a long, anonymous ride. In the end it was clear to every onlooker that neither dying woman would ever let go of the other. Leaves of lemon grass had drifted to the ground from the dress pocket of one of the women, marking their trail to the ambulance. Some of the sprigs and blades were bloodstained, adding spice to the liquid life that had trickled away.

I was very intrigued by the books dramatic portrayal of people dealing with such complex and unforgettable pasts. It’s more than that, though. How do we incorporate the different lives we lead into the present? The Vietnam veteran whose mind is vividly separated by 30 years and thousands of miles. Dealing with living in both the present and living in a war, on a hill, so far in the past, but still very much part of the present.

To a lesser degree, I think many of us struggle with this. How many of us are partly stuck in some distant past? Are you still partly living in High School? That song on the radio that transports you back to the High School lunch room. Or an old car … or a smell in the air that suddenly takes you back to a particular beach in Puerto Rico.

And how often have we projected ourselves into the future … steadfastly stating that, ‘I will never be like my parents!’ – ‘I’ll not make those mistakes when I’m grown’. Then you hit 35 or 40 or 45 and suddenly, you see your father in the mirror, or your mother’s voice comes out of your mouth in a moment of frustration. Then it hits you … we are more than the sum of our corporal parts.

I think everyone, has the memory of a moment, where they knew for certain that there was more to them than just this body, this pile of chemicals, this present … this now.

Maybe standing on the beach, waiting for the sun to rise. Then that magical moment when the sun leaps from the horizon in an explosion of color – as we spread our arms to capture every amazing bit of that moment, we are also spreading our wings on an ethereal world, feeling the splendor of another sun.

Is that why we seek out books and movies and music that move us? Are we ‘pan-consciously’ feeling our way through multiple times? Multiple lives? Each with an array of ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’. Other souls that are also bound across distance and through years. Each of us linked to that same place, that same time.

Well, who knows. But occasionally finding a book that makes me stop and think about who I am and where I am … is why I read in the first place. If you are like me and seek out beautifully written, emotionally challenging books – don’t miss this one.

From the dedication page:

It is easy to know the beauty of inhuman things, sea, storm and
mountain; it is their soul and their meaning.
Humanity has its lesser beauty, impure and painful; we have to harden our hearts to bear it.
I have hardened my heart only a little; I have learned that happiness is important, but pain gives importance.
The use of tragedy: Lear becomes as tall as the storm he crawls in; and a tortured Jew became God.

Robinson Jeffers, The World’s Wonders

Jack Kerouac’s first published novel, The Town and the City is a story of monumental scope and great emotional depth. The book’s jacket cover talks about Kerouac’s idolization of Thomas Wolfe and this book reflects that interest. The story is about choices and regrets. It’s also about a generation robbed of choices and left wondering and apathetic and lost. The book tells the story of a family growing up in a small New Hampshire town pre-World War II and follows the family through war and loss.

The book is written in 3rd person. I realized soon after starting The Town and the City that most of what I’ve read recently is 1st person or some variation of 1st person. Which is fine; 1st person is very intimate. However, in Kerouac’s book, the choice of style really opens up the story. Instead of the reader having a close relationship with one or two people, the environment opens up and we form relationships with several people and feel part of the town. To say that in a different way, if the book were written 1st person, we would be looking through the eyes of the key character or characters. We would see the town and the rooms and the other characters, but more in a ‘Being John Malkovich’ way. Kerouac gives the reader room to appreciate the size and space of the story. We’re drawn in to the town, the sounds of the river, and late-night mournful calls of a passing freight train.

The following quote from the book reflects one of the son’s feelings while riding a troop train from one part of America to the other. He’s just finished a letter from his mother.

This is the pitiful way it was: and all the eerie feelings that young men were having in some strange part of the country far away from the places that had always been familiar in their lives, which were become unreal and fantastic now as a dream, and maddening and sorrowful too; and all the night-dreams woven out of three thousand miles of continental traveling and ten thousand miles of earth-traveling that were so gray and strange and pitiably enacted upon some deranged little map of the mind that was supposed to represent the continent of America and the earth itself. Sailors dreaming of the sea as some poignant little lake, or of their movements north and south, east and west on the terrific seas, as on some gray little canal or river, with life teeming on the banks; soldiers dreaming of America as some packed little place with mysterious fields and roads leading directly within walking dream-distance from state to state, or of islands in the Pacific as little puddle-jumps in the sweet small lake of the mind-all the vast and oceanic and terrific distances compressed by human necessity into something no bigger than a field, and a lake, or the palm of a hand.

And then the bugle blowing in some Dakota army camp, and the rawboned, windburnt boys waking up again to the clear cold mornings and great snow-distances and distant hills, to drafty barracks and rough khaki trousers and the heavy G.I. boots clomping, waking up to steaming breakfasts, hot coffee, a cigarette, and then the windswept range and the peppery chatter of rifles firing in the frozen air, the broken cry of a sergeant, a puff of smoke, and someone rubbing his raw chapped hands together and grinning steamily in the morning air.

Or the Cost Guardsmen on some heaving little cutter off Labrador waking up to the violent squeak of the ship, the pitching and flopping on the waves, the wild dawn-light over the seething field of waters, and the cook’s slop bucket flying garbage into the sea, the acrid nauseous smell of cigarette smoke in the mess, the big red-faced gunner’s mate from Iowa slopping catsup all over his eggs, the little mascot-pups yapping broken cries in the North Atlantic wind, the rigging by the afterdeck squeaking and straining and the flag cracking in the wind, and the wide mournful spread of slow, smoking merchant ships crawling in formation around the horizon all dark and low-slung and cumbrous in the sea. It seemed as though a whole nation of men and women were beginning to wander with the war.

The Town and the City is a beautiful, large and expansive novel that carries great emotional depth. I highly recommend everyone read this book.