Customer Reviews (1)

Can't beat it for a critical text on Barth
Not enough has been written about John Barth. This book pulls what has been said already together in an enlightening way. It helps if you know a little about literary theory. If not, you can just skip the first two chapters. The part about Lost in the Funhouse is especially enlightening. ... Read more

Product Description
The year is 2045 and a well respected newspaper columnist, David Cohen, is offered a once in a lifetime assignment. David is accustomed to his somewhat mundane lifestyle, and suddenly finds himself in unfamiliar territory and danger. David is desperate to uncover the secrets of Northland. This segregated city was built within the U.S borders and its policy is "White Christians Only". The leaders of Northland legally circumvented the laws to build their city in the heart of America. A hand picked group of media and journalists from outside of Northland were invited to this city to interview its people and leaders and report to the world the truth about this well guarded city. For years the people of the United States have come to believe that Northland and its leaders have other plans that could change the way they live, and alter their lifestyles. David, with the help of his assistant Connie, must obtain the proof he needs before he can write his story. David unexpectedly finds himself falling for Connie and struggles to keep his focus. Will other areas and other groups of people now living in the United States follow the same path as the city of Northland, or can we break the bigotry that has always existed in America? ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

This is not THAT John Barth

Please note that this is not a review, but a note to readers. There appears to be a misconception, implied in part by the site structure of Amazon and other online retailers, that Northland is a new novel by the National Book Award-winning author John Barth (Giles Goat Boy, Sot Weed Factor, Chimera). This isn't the case, however.

Northland is printed through Authorhouse, a self-publishing company. As their "About the Author" information indicates, Northland was written by another writer who happens to share the name John Barth, and the two writers' biographies bear no resemblance to one another. It might be helpful if the writer of Northland were to adopt a middle initial in order to distinguish himself from the established author, for the benefit of readers.

The latest book by postmodern novelist John Barth is The Development, a collection of short stories published in 2008 by Houghton Mifflin.

("3-stars" is simply a neutral choice, as I've not read Northland.)
... Read more

Product Description
National Book Award winner John Barth offers a rambunctious story full of narrative high jinks in this lively, inventive epic. Journalist Simon Behler finds himself in the house of Sinbad the Sailor after being washed ashore during a seagoing adventure. Over the course of six evenings, the two take turns recounting their voyages, merging medieval Baghdad and twentieth-century Maryland in a brilliantly entertaining weave of stories within stories. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (18)

Fine writing, mediocre book
Do not approach this book thinking you will come away feeling satisfied. You won't. You will be impressed by the writing. Every sentence is well-crafted. You will be impressed by the wit. Parts of this book are truly funny. You will be taken with the author's fertile imagination, and tickled by what other reviewers are calling the "pornographic" parts--that's much too harsh a word, I think.

But...you will find it tedious reading at times. You will easily enjoy parts of it--the parts set in modern times and wish there were more of them. You will be amused, for a time, with Sinbad's adventures. But you will, I think, decide that there are too many of them, they go on for too long and they don't contribute as much as the author thinks they do.

And when you put the book down, you will, if you're like me, utter the single comment: "Argh!" You will find the ending ambiguous and unsatisfying. We are led by the hand to one last great trip. The trip begins...and then the book runs out of pages.

This is not, I am afraid, the Sot-Weed Factor. The author is a fine, even great writer, but this is far from his best work.

Great and memorable.A keeper.
A terrific, memorable, multi-layered novel that's easy to get into discussions about.

I am a voracious reader and ex-librarian, but this is one of only three novels that I've kept (since 1992).It is leaning against "The Cloud Atlas" which is another story-in a story-in a story (and which I like much more than Barth's).

I hated Barths earlier books having read some as a freshman in 1970 (required).I attempted his other books after reading this one and couldn't get into them at all.

So, fourteen years later, I still admire this tale very much and recommend it to humans of any sexual persuasion.

In Today's Political Climate, This Novel Is a Must Read
I don't know if Barth has ever been in Iraq, but he reproduces its flavor vividly in THE LAST VOYAGE OF SOMEBODY THE SAILOR, a meditation on difference and the idea of "the other."For as long as people have had imaginations, the concept of the fish out of water has been a source of both comfort and amusement.Take Twain's Connecticut Yankee--a bold storyline that reinforced Gilded Age stereotypes while ostensibly criticizing them as being inferior to the medieval faith that gave King Arthur's Court its reason for being.Barth takes Twain's message and stands it on his head.His protagonist, Simon Behler, approaches Sri Lanka but, like the man in the old joke, the closer he gets to it the further away it seems, and instead he winds up stuck in what appears to be his own "Orientalist" fantasy of Baghdad and its environs six hundred years ago, when Sinbad and the other so-called Arabian Nights were being composed from the scraps and orts of court and peasant life.

Behler finds this world to be a disorderly screen for his memories of ordinary life.No longer a young man, the whole progress of his life back home comes back to him in perfectly realized fragments, almost worthy of Sherwood Anderson, and we begin to realize that the novel is being staged around the age-old questioning of, what is more valuable--"home" or "away," the comfort of the familiar versus the thrill of the unseen.

The female characters leave a lot to be desired, but at this stage in the game, Barth is not even trying to pretend he has any feminist sympathies.His day in the sun happened years ago, but this testament of a man's "last voyage" has a bittersweet texture, like taking chocolate from an Iraqi baby.If you are enjoying the new bestseller by Umberto Eco, THE MYSTERIOUS FLAME OF QUEEN LOANA, you owe it to yourself to check out this predecessor, which employs many of the same devices although more clumsily.

This tale about tales is a whopper!
John Barth is one of America's greatest writers, a story teller on par with Twain and Steinbeck, Boyle and Bellow. As far as I can tell, however, none of them ever wrote a story about story telling, which is what Barth has done in this fantastical epic. Simon Behler (if that is, in fact, the name of the identity- and perspective-challenged narrator), for whom water has always played some central role in his life, appears to have swum through a rip in the time/space and reality/fantasy continuum, where he ultimately arrives at the doorstep of the fabled Sinbad The Sailor, and his captivating daughter Yasmin. Invited in, he and Sinbad swap tales of their respective, fantastic voyages in front of myriad household members and prospective investors for Sinbad's proposed seventh voyage, all of whom doubt the origins and suspect the motives of our narrator. Except, of course, for the delicious Yasmin, who, it turns out, has a mysterious and inexorable connection to Simon.

While this is a tale filled with mystery and adventure, love and sex, betrayal and death, and an endless supply of conflict, the underlying theme is the role that stories play in our lives, both as literal archives and moral instruction. Barth's trademark wordplay makes every passage worth a second and third reading, and his characters are impressively believable given their unbelievable context. Like his other masterpiece, "The Sot-Weed Factor," this is a sprawling and ribald epic, showcasing the enormous intellect and imagination of an American master in his prime.

Just one more tale before I die, even if it's this one
While heading for Sri Lanka with his girl friend, Simon William Behler, becomes stranded, not only in place, but more importantly in time.A man of the first half of the 20th century, Simon finds himself suddenly in medieval Iraq.Simon is saved by men employed by none other than Sinbad the Sailor.Sinbad and Simon, respectively, trade tales of adventure and the adventure of growing up in a tidewater town in Baltimore.Sinbad's voyages are packed with legends and myths, right out of "1001 Arabian Nights."While Sinbad's recounting of these voyages have moments of excitement, they are poor substitutes for Simon's routine stories of growing up.I have read about similar things many times before: the first kiss, the loss of one's virginity to an older girl considered crazy by the other boys in the town.Barth presents Simon's ultimate "rite of passage" with much fanfare.I could not help but compare that to the need for Yasmin, Sinbad's daughter, to protect her virginity at all costs, with the unwanted assistance of those too eager to examine Yasmin, lest she prove herself unfit for marriage.Barth consistently pounds away at the virginity issue with the subtlety of a sledge hammer.

Despite its occasional bright spots, most noteworthy the nature of Simon's birth and his strange "relationship" with his twin sister, _The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor_ is a huge disappointment.I expect more originality and humor from the author of _Tidewater Tales_ and _Giles Goat Boy_.In those two books Barth is a master in combining Greek mythology and other fantasy with great plots, lots of imagination, and a raucously witty writing style.In _The Last Voyage_ Barth too often falls into cliche and misses his usual standard considerably. ... Read more

Product Description
a novel subtitled "a romance" ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

Ebbs and Wanes
A newspaper article mentioned Barth in passing and a used book rack supplied Sabbatical. It's hard to draw reference points for Barth with Sabbatical, but it I suppose a nautically-minded, Cold War-centric Umberto Eco is the best I can do. The book is firmly fixed in the pantheon of post-modern metafiction, that much is certain.

The story (if there is one) follows the (mostly) sailing adventures of Susan Fenwick Turner and Susan Seckler, a comfortably bourgeois writer-turned CIA operative turned writer, and an uncomfortably elite writing professor (professors writing about professors, so it goes), descendant from F. Scott Key and Edgar Allan Poe, respectively. Barth's story is crammed with metaphors and allusions so thick they literally make your head bulge while you're trying to follow the story. At times impressive in breadth, there's not always a matching depth, and, I suspect, many go ignored by those of us lacking Ph.D.s in literary theory and semiotics. Barth is more interested in viewing life through a seafaring lens than spinning a yarn, though several back-stories concerning bikers, rape, Vietnamese poetry, Iranian intelligence, CIA, Latin American intrigue, and identity politics seep in and take form.

Heavy-handed metaphors overwhelm the enthusiastic Barth reader--upstream, downtream, sperm and ova, etc. The excessive self-referential footnoting, while appreciated and edifying, soon becomes intrusive and tiring. Where is Barth going? What is his point? I'm pretty sure it's somewhere at the bottom of the sea, along with the many mysteries in Fenwick's life. Still, at the rather exciting start, and other points throughout the book, complemented by his thoroughly confident seaman's narrative, Barth fascinates and inspires.

Pointless, plotless, empty
This is the second work that I have read by this author.The first was very stupid and so I thought I give him a second chance.The reviews on this book sounded encouraging.So I got it and I read it.Initially, the story seems to be interesting and it feels like he might go somewhere.However, all the major things that occur in his book have no connection to one another and in no connection to any theme or plot.For example, while there sailing they find a mysterious island where someone shoots at them and they hear voices but cannot find any person.They also see an actual sea monster that comes up and then leaves.They are also solicited by the CIA.They are also looking for two relatives that work for the CIA that disappeared. Do not think that any of the events listed above means anything more than I just described.They simply happen and the author offers no explanation.There are no allusions to them later on.So what was the point? The list of things to happen goes on and on.What is most annoying about this but is that none of these items has anything to do with any other item and none of them are resolved in any way.The book simply ends with a author decided that he could not make any point of anything.

This book is a waste of time.It's not that enjoyable to read on the way either.

I was left feeling that the author feels that he is so important that he should be listened to no matter what he says even if it is mediocre.That's what this novel is.

I don't get it
I loved "Tidewater Tales" and was enormously impressed so went looking for other John Barth books and found "Sabbitical".The names are different but the story (or one of the stories) and I still enjoyed it.However I was hoping to find something from the author explaining why write "Sabbitical" first and then retell the tale as part of "Tidewater Tales", although I now know why the Talbotsboat is called "Reprise"

Sailing up the chesapeake, sailing up the chesapeake,
Sailing up the chesapeake bay.John Barth brings us sailing once again, this time with the tale of married ex CIA-and-deeper-operative-turned-tell-almost-all-expose-writer Fenwick (descendant of Francis Scott Key) and literary prof Susan (descendant of Edgar Allen Poe), aboard their ship Pokey, while they wrestle with all of the things that can come between the introduction of the gun in Act I and its being fired in Act III, between the act and its resolution, things like birth, death, loyalty, rambunctious nephews, seamonsters. There are common themes here, sure, but for this reader, Barth's talent ensures that the style transcends gimmick.The story never gets too horribly muckied up while he plays around.In fact, sometimes his bold this-is-what-i'm-going-to-make-happen-next-and-this-is-why entrances/intrusions actually increase our appreciation/wonder for his craft.The man is telling you flat out how he plans to manipulate your senses of awe and delight, and thus warned, you're still blown away when he actually goes ahead and does it. Barth is an uncommon magician, in that he has no secrets, and yet he is no less magical

Like the tide, Barth's stories cleanse and refresh us

I suppose it is inevitable that, as the post-war boomers approach the big six-zero over the next decade,we will see a tidal flood of tender, soul-searching narratives.Boomers want to understand rather than simply experience life,and most have been frustrated by life's refusal to obey our expectations.

John Barth seems to have made such soul searching his life work,and I seem to have followed him book for book, life experience by life experience over the years. A clever "academic" writer (read: "he writes like a dream but his wit sometimes overwhelms the story"),Barth has addressed boomer experience and frailty .

Seeming to be five to ten years ahead of boomers,his books have ranged from the tragedy resulting from a terribly botched abortion (long before we openly spoke of this horror),through the visionary and usually misguided quest of the idealist (Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goatboy),the terrible pain of realizing one is an adult (the clever but exhausting Letters),to more leisurely and accessible mid-life reassessment as protagonists take "voyages" on the emotional seascape of middle age (Sabbatical,Tidewater Tales,Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor,Once upon a Time...).

Each five years or so,I eagerly await his newest offering,devour it,and then feel frustrated when his literary games seem to detract from his story.

But,then,each time I realize (as if for the first time),the essential nature of his writing.Like the age-old games from which his writings spring (the quest/redemption stories of the Iliad and Oddessy,the "doomed" prophet stories of the Old and New Testaments,the mistaken identity games of Shakespeare and thousands of authors since,and the metaphor of story as voyage and voyage as growth from Chaucer,1001 Nights, etc),Barth plays his games to remind us that the act of story telling *is* the experience,it *is* the reason we read: the experience of hearing ghost stories around the camp fire remains with us long long after we have forgotten the actual story.

And then I remember that, as a reader,I have no more "right" to expect neatness and closure in a Barth story than I have the right to expect neatness and closure in my own life.Try as we might,our own work,our own story is always in progress.And like Barth's beloved Tidewater,the ebb and flow of our own story defies our attempt to capture to master it.

In the end,life and Barth's stories remain as delightfully cleansing as the tide itself.

KRHwww.umeais.maine.edu/~hayward ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

To be or not
In his earliest novels (this was his first), Barth dealt with nihilism, but with a grin. This book is all about how a character named Todd chose a day in 1937 to commit suicide and then came to the conclusion, since life is so meaningless, so is death: might as well go on living. Barth writes in an interesting tone and style - not straight narrative. He also shows great authority, which is unusual in a first novel.

Barth 101: An Introduction to the Master
John Barth's first novel will celebrate its fiftieth anniversary of publication in 2006 (I read the 1967 revised edition, which Barth rewrote primarily, he says, to restore his original ending).Should this almost 50 year-old book, whose protagonist was born in 1900, still be read in the 21st century, by people who may not have even been alive when Barth wrote it?Emphatically, positively, yes!

The Floating Opera serves as an excellent introduction to the body of work of one of the 20th century's greatest writers (time will tell), and also stands on its own as an engrossing, amusing, thought-provoking tale.It establishes many of Barth's common themes and settings:the flawed, cynical (yet also fun-loving) protagonist; impossible quests; the absurdities of society's structures and laws; philosophy and morality; coastal Maryland and boating on the Chesapeake.Barth's later works are longer and much more intricate, so TFO is very much like Beethoven's first symphony: a simpler work than his later masterpieces, but which still shows definite signs of genius, originality, and timelessness.

The storyline, like Barth's other works, is quirky and highly original.It describes the lead-up to an event that, because of the way the book was written (in the first person), the reader knows cannot have taken place.Barth openly explains the disjointed nature of the book's structure (which is just one way that the floating opera of the title is important to the story), and everything holds together in the end.

TFO's protagonist, Todd Andrews, is a lawyer who has developed a detached, cynical view of the world.His mentality is perfect for his profession, and he wins his cases by crafting intricate technical loopholes that reduce his cases to absurdities.Thirty-five years before the Johnnie Cochran's poetic words in the O.J. Simpson trial, Barth prophetically describes a similar situation of the "bon mot" winning out over the "mot juste".But this is just one of the amusing vignettes in TFO. Barth also describes the challenges of an open love triangle, different ways to approach old age and death, the drawbacks of various outlooks on life, and an intense father-son relationship.Comic relief is never too far away, especially when the various crusty old men in the book are speaking.

How to rate TFO?On the Barth scale, it is not his greatest masterpiece, so you'd have to give it less than 5 stars.But on the scale of all works and all authors, it definitely deserves a 5 star rating.

Incredibly well-crafted, subtly psychotic
Barth's first work out of the gate is a tremendous literary success. How did he know so much about the world as a young man of twenty-four? It boggles the mind. I first encountered the Floating Opera when I myself was in my early twenties, and identified deeply with its philosophical, questing hero. Revisiting the book more than a decade later, some of its philosophizing comes off as a touch sophomoric, but I still find it deeply satisfying. It's written with wit, charm, and extreme self-assurance, and the plot is beautifully paced, with many hilarious digressions along the way, weaving together to form a wonderful picture of life in small-town Maryland. Barth also had a nose for hot-button issues (his second Book, the End of the Road, took on abortion in the late '50s), and the ending of the Opera features an offhand suicide-bombing attempt that raises the hair on one's neck far more today than it would've a decade ago.

Short AND bleak AND funny
Barth has so many big huge enormous novels that his first two shorter works are perhaps unjustly overlooked in the shadows of their bulkier brethren.This novel coupled with The End of the Road established him as a new voice with a distinctly different point of view.No doubt readers were hardly ready to read the book and find out that it's about a man who one day decides that the most logical thing for him to do is commit suicide and so he spends the entire book discussing what exactly led him to this decision.Barth somehow turns this jarring premise into something both witty and often extremely funny.Told in the first person, like most of his best books, the constant barrage of mythological references that characterize most of his work haven't appeared yet and so the book remains mostly straightforward (though the copy on the front cover amusingly compares the book to famous literary personages) . . . or at least as straightforward as Barth gets.The narrator tells his story in a roundabout fashion, jumping all over the place in time, sometimes stopping the story for brief asides that occur to him along the way, always reminding the reader of the planned end result of all of this.Barth manages to keep his narrator witty and involving, his viewpoint is detached and often bordering on existential, yet the book isn't cold and sterile, in fact it's move very quickly and despite its subject matter is pretty enjoyable.It's not as dark as The End of the Road and even though it's about suicide it really isn't all that depressing.For some reason the original ending was changed at the request (more like demand) of the publisher, later versions have restored the original and I'm not sure what the fuss was all about, there's nothing really shocking about it.Different times I guess.Still, along The End of the Road, this remains one of the best ways to ease your way into Barth before tackling the more complicated, erudite stuff he would later accomplish.Everyone has to start somewhere.You might as well start here.

Thought provoking up-close and personal entertainment
This work of fiction is told from a sort of 3-D first person perspective. The main character/narrator tells his story while adressing you as the reader on such subjects as his writing skills (or lack there of) and hisidea of how a good story should be told. The just of the story is that ofhow the "author" comes to the conclusion that he is going tocommit suicide and tells you of the many events leading to that conclusiononly then to have his mind changed by an extraordinary event one day. Theautobiographical aspect of the author's life gives some serious food forphilosophical thought that leads the reader with wit and humor. ... Read more

Product Description
Starting with an analysis of the close relation of Trinity and revelation in Barth, Jüngel goes on to look at Barth's action of divine objectivity in relation to human subjectivity. He closes with a discussion of the ontological implications of God's self-manifestation at the Cross. This translation of Jüngel's Gottes Sein ist in Werden also incorporates material from the 1975 German edition, together with a substantial new introduction by Professor John Webster. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

The Self-Revelation of God
Although Eberhard Jüngel would consider this work to be a "summary" of Karl Barth's doctrine of God's self-revelation, it clearly moves beyond Barth to take the argument into new areas of thought.The book excels in that it shows the value of theological language to describe those things that transcend both analytic and continental categories.Since summing up Jüngel's dense thinking in a few paragraphs would be impossible, might I instead share a final passage (and nudge to Heidegger) that was extremely insightful:

"God's self-relatedness thus springs from the becoming in which God's being is.The becoming in which God's being is is a becoming out of the word in which God says Yes to himself.But to God's affirmation of himself there corresponds the affirmation of the creature through God.In the affirmation of his creature, as it becomes event in the incarnation of God, God reiterates his self-relatedness in relation to the creature, as revealer, revelation and as revealedness.This christological relation to the creature is also a becoming in which God's being is.But in that God in Jesus Christ became man, he is as creature exposed to perishing.Is God's being in becoming, here, a being-unto-death?

The New Testament witness answers this question with the message of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.This message witnesses that where God's being in becoming was swallowed up in perishing, perishing was itself swallowed up in the becoming.In this it was established that God's being remains a being in becoming.In the event of the death of Jesus Christ, God remains true to himself as the triune God in his Yes to humanity.In the death of Jesus Christ, God's Yes, which constitutes all being, exposed itself to the No of nothingness.In the resurrection of Jesus Christ this Yes prevailed over the 'No' of nothingness.And in just this victory it was established through grace why there is something at all, and not rather nothing" (122-123). ... Read more

Product Description
This authoritative book offers challenging yet accessible accounts of the major features of Barth's theological work, especially as it has become available through the publication of his collected works, and interacts with the best of contemporary Barth scholarship. It assesses Barth's significance for contemporary constructive theology, and his place in the history of twentieth-century Christian thought. The Companion both sums up and extends recent renewed interest in Barth's theology, especially in English-speaking theology, and shows him to be once again a major voice in constructive theology. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Thought Provoking Book on Barth
Any multi-authored book on one writer/ theologian is bound to have high points and low points.However, this book is a must read.As an introduction to Barth's thought this is not for the beginner.It presupposes a fairly high amount of knowledge regarding Barth to be able to work through it.Having said this -- most of the writers do an outstanding job in interacting with Barth's thought.Webster's introduction is nicely done.Heron's conclusion and interaction with Barth's legacy is also beautiful.And then, its worth having the book just for Bruce McCormack's, George Hunsinger's, and Trevor Hart's articles on Barth.If you want to begin to understand Barth, this is a book that you must read eventually.

A Good Reference Source on Barth
Any book that attempts to summarize the thought of Barth in 300 pages is faced with an impossible task.Barth's thought was so exhaustive and trickled down into so many areas of theology and life that no summary can do complete justice to Barth.Nevertheless, this book puts forth a good effort toward that end.

Webster has assembled many of the heavy hitters in Barth scholarship to tackle various key areas of Barth's thought.Trevor Hart provides a good chapter on Barth's view of revelation.Nigel Biggar's contribution on ethics is also good.

The brewing scholarly battle between Graham Ward and Bruce McCormack concerning possible similarities between Barth and Derrida regarding language is not hinted at in the book.The reader only gets Ward's side of it, in which he argues that Barth's contention that human language is inherently incapable of describing the "wholly other" God finds a home in the later thought of Derrida.McCormack is on record saying that any similarities between Barth and Derrida are superficial, and in my view, McCormack is closer to the truth on this.However, this book does not present McCormack's position, and thus may very well give the reader the impression that Ward's position is the accepted position on this question within Barth scholarship.It is not.

In addition, one would have hoped for a more in-depth treatment regarding Barth's relationship to Kantian philosophy.Given Barth's crucial importance chronologically in coming onto the theological scene in Europe at a time when the Kantian-influenced theologies of Schleiermacher and Ritschl reigned supreme, an understanding of Barth's intense reaction against both strains strikes me as critical in putting Barth into context and assessing him within this context.While Kant is mentioned more than once in this book, it is only in skeletal form, and this is a weakness.Putting Barth into the proper historical context is absolutely essential in assessing his importance, and this book could have been better at doing that.

But overall, the contributions in here are scholarly, well documented, and informative for someone looking to gain a good working knowledge of Barth.Evangelicals need to contend with Barth responsibly, and we have been mostly neglectful in doing this.One way to do this is to read a book like this which attempts to thoughtfully interact with Barth from a mostly non-evangelical perspective.As such, I commend it to discerning evangelicals. ... Read more

Product Description
This text looks at the pessimistic and optimistic route to God after death. The book looks at nihilism, the rejection of religion and moral principles, and offers hope in eschatology, the theology of death and a final destination. It examines the idea that there is a "void" and not a God, that death is a "strange and frightening journey". ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Boldly going where Barth Studies have never Been Before
In the overcrowded world of Barth studies this one doesn't get lost in the crowd!This is a unique thesis - McDowell points out that eschatology and hope are central to what Barth is doing with his theology.Its not always an easy read, but definitely well worth persevering with.It has revolutionised my understanding of Barth.
Dr Helen K Bond, Aberdeen University

Author's Summary
As Jürgen Moltmann has famously argued, hope makes a difference to life and practice.Tracing this through the writings of Karl Barth, this study endeavours to call into question the paucity of critical comment on Barth's eschatology, the theological soil from which his Christian hope grows.Failing to acknowledge and do justice to his distinctively christomorphic hope, then, misses something essential in Barth's theological perspective. Yet certain tensions are identified and questioned through interaction with the use of the genre of the tragic in George Steiner, Donald MacKinnon and Friedrich Nietzsche in particular. ... Read more

Product Description
Karl Barth is widely considered the greatest theologian of the Twentieth Century, exerting a major influence in almost every area of theological thought in both Reformation and Roman Catholic traditions.

Ecclesial Mediation in Karl Barth deals with one of the most important and controversial themes in Barth's theology, the relation between divine and human action. John Yocum argues that Barth's late rejection of the concept of sacrament, explicated in the final volume of his Church Dogmatics, is not only at odds with his account of the nature and importance of sacraments presented earlier in the Church Dogmatics but subverts important elements of his theology as a whole especially the mediation of divine grace in preaching and the Bible.Bringing Barth into fruitful dialogue with Yves Congar, Yocum contends that the notion of sacrament is crucial to an account of the divine-human relation that respects the character of both agents. ... Read more

Product Description
Barth's richest, most joyous novel yet describes a couple's journey on the Chesapeake Bay, a cruise that overflows with stories--of past lives and love, entanglements with the CIA and toxic waste, and inventive brushes with Don Quixote, Odysseus and Scheherazade. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

Tedious tedium, with style
I can see that this book has deeply touched the lives of several reviewers, and I mean them no disrespect; but I do feel that this page could use some balance. I simply could not dig my way through this incredibly long and meandering novel. After 80 pages I skipped ahead, read a couple pages, skipped ahead, read more, skipped ahead again. Not a lot happens. Nothing memorable is said. I encountered no moving episodes. Nothing I could call funny, or exciting. It's about rather dull people doing rather dull things and telling rather dull stories. All written with remarkable skill and flair, admittedly, but skill and flair aren't nearly enough to keep a reader engaged for over a quarter-million words.

I recommend this book to the hopelessly literary. If your idea of great fun is to get together with friends over wine and cheese and discuss James Joyce's Ulysses long into the night, you'll love The Tidewater Tales. The rest of us are advised to seek reading pleasure elsewhere.

Clearly a banquet that lingers in the memory
Peter is a working class successful writer who has become blocked andso begs his well heeled wife (Katherine) who is 8 ½ months pregnant to set him a task. She does which is to tell stories as they sail around the Chesapeake Bay (a 200 mile long estuary on the Virginia and Maryland coastlines) in their boat called Story. During of which we discover how they fell in love in the 60's but not met up until the 70's and why they are having babies now as they hit 40.But this is only one of three other love stories in the novel. One is the love of landscape and the other is of sailing. Both of which are powerfully evoked throughout the novel. Their love story, landscape and sailing are then effectively linked to their families. Hers being local old money who have shaped the land since before the USA was founded and his being boat builders who have shaped access to the water since coming over in the 19th century.

Katherine's family are open, generous friendly and sophisticated so accept and support the whims of Peter and Katherine to sail around the Bay. Likewise Peter shy and intense and Katherine open and bright are deep friends and in love so we like the characters and join in the physicality evoked by the writing. However these are but three of several strands in the novel, two others are a political thriller and an eco-mystery. The first explores the CIA-KGB spy games as the SALT talks dirty tricks play out in the local area. The second looks at the environmental damage being done by illegal dumping. Both story lines are linked firmly with Katharine's ex husband and her charming but wastrel brother but not as you expect.

But all this are themes for the real focus of the novel which is about the art and mystery of writing and story telling. So over the 14 days of sailing we move in and out ofthe stories of Don Quixote, Huckleberry Finn, 1001 nights of Arabian Tales, Odyssey as they shapeand are shaped by the love story landscape and sailing.We meet the narrators as characters finishing their own stories and shaping the novel as we do as reader-characters. This means that the narrative moves through a whole range of formats (plays, short essays, monologues, puns, wordplay etc) and genres (love story, social comedy, thriller, family saga, etc) with us and the unborn babies as narrator commentators along with the characters who know they are in a story. And we know their fates outside the story itself.

Don't expect a quick read as its 655 pages and small print but do expect an intellectual tour de force and a page turner for what is mediation on writing that races along driven by the reader's identification with Peter's writers block, and their immediate parenthood while the multi-layer story entertains and stretches. Clearly a banquet that lingers in the memory when many beans on toast novels have been long forgotten so highly recommended.

Set me a task!
Set me a task indeed!It has become the catch phrase my wife and I use to pull ourselves out of a funk... and reading this book will pull just about anyone out of theirs.Following Peter and Kate's sailing adventure over the course of the last 14 days of their pregnancy (with twins) is a celebration of life.Don't be daunted by it's length! It's like reading multiple books in one:a travel book, a play, throw a little espionage and environmentalism into the pot and meet some of literature's greatest characters along the way.Get through the first 50 pages, then sit back and enjoy the ride.By the end you'll find that you just don't want it to end.

What he's done is what he'll do
Of the maybe five novels of Barth I've read so far in my young life, this is probably my favorite of them all (Sot-Weed Factor does run a close second, however) if only due to the laziness factor since I didn't feel I needed a doctorate in English literature or mythology to understand everything that was going on.All told, on the surface this is probably one of the lighter books he's done . . . it's basically about a couple (teh wife's eight months pregnant) going out sailing in Cheaspeake Bay and to pass time they start telling stories.Except it's about everything else too and slowly the novel starts to incorporate local history, the knots of the characters' lives, mythology, plays, short stories . . . you name it.For someone not of Barth's skill this would come off as a tedious academic exercise merely to show the author's genre bending abilities.Once in a while it teeters toward that but manages to stay on the right side of the line.What helps is the sheer exuburance of the book, the people all seem to like each other (not that there isn't conflict), folks are happy with their lives, never before has Barth managed to create a more three dimensional set of people or given them a more realistic world to inhabit.It's just genuinely enjoyable to read, especially as the stories and stories-within-stories start to bounce off each othere.There are echoes of several of Barth's earlier works here, I spotted definitely Lost in the Funhouse and Chimera (and the Sot-Weed Factor is mentioned) so for long time readers it's a bit of a revisit with old friends.Is the book probably longer than it needs to be?Yeah, but if long books are your problem than you shouldn't be reading Barth.The main couple Peter and Katherine are sometimes a bit too precious for words (the constant renaming of the babies got annoying real fast) and in spurts there is just too much love going around but I can't really level that as a flaw now, can I?Politics does threaten to creep in every so often but it's dated eighties style politics now so I didn't pay much attention to it.Overall, it doesn't break any vibrant new ground for Barth but serves as a fine summing up of his strengths and his skills, the man can tell a decent story and he can write the pants off just about anybody (and no, those aren't the same thing) so if you want a fun "literary" novel that won't overwhelm you with all those nasty post-modern tricks those oh so erudite authors love to pull on unsuspecting readers, this might just be what you're looking for.Just stay away if you're allergic to mythology, if you want to read Barth it's not something you can easily escape from.But I like it anyway.

Sailing while nine mos. pregnant???!Can you imagine it?
Barth is a fine writer who does a marvelous job in creating believable and likable characters.it was fun to sail with him and his yuppy friends in the Chesapeake.(A non-sailer would miss much of the action and pleasureof this novel) The story of the couple and the boat would make a fine butsmaller novel. Barth's politics are those of aca- deme and perhaps intrudetoo much into what is supposed to be only a story...not an effort toconvert those who are not PC already.But he sure

can write and OH, I dolove KISS just as he does. ... Read more

Product Description
Barth's complex, controversial models of ideas are interpreted to guide the intelligent first reader through these virtuoso presentations of the narrative process. Explicating the text with attention to published criticism on Barth and to Barth's own published literary theory as well as the theory intrinsic to the novels, Zack Bowen carefully builds an informed perspective on the fiction. Each of the ten major works is considered separately but with references to ideas and patterns discernible in other Barth works. Selected recurring themes and techniques and a biographical note are included in the appendixes. Bowen surveys the most valuable criticism as part of his introduction and provides a substantial bibliography of books and articles on the body of work, the individual works, and Barth's other publications and interviews. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

a rare conceptual grasp of these theologians
Representation And Substitution In The Atonement Theologies Of Dorothee Solle, John Macquarrie, And Karl Barth by Jeannine Michele Graham (American University Studies Theology and Religion Series VII Theology and Religion: Peter Lang Publishing) How does what happened 2000 years ago in the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ radically alter the human nature and life situation of men and women in every generation up to the present day? Pursuit of this question provided the initial impetus for this book, a study of two vital themes pertaining to the doctrine of atonement--representation and substitution. The author explores their meaning and role within the theologies of three significantly diverse contemporary theologians--Dorothee Solle, John Macquarrie, and Karl Barth--concluding with a comparative analysis of all three perspectives in relation to each other.
Graham demonstrates a rare conceptual grasp of her topic and the theologians she chooses to analyze.This work provides a useful introduction to these theologians and a thorough review of the principal issues of representation and substitution in the theologies of atonement.I include below an excerpt from her conclusion which does a pretty good job of summarizing the scope of her study.However Graham's great strength is in her descriptive analytical comparisons of these theologians views, for which I suggest you consult the main body of the text.
Excerpt: The title of this study has set the christological parameters by which we have sought to explicate the doctrine of the reconciliation of God with humankind. The governing presupposition has been that it is in Christ's being and acting for us that such restoration occurs. How have the key themes of representation and substitution shaped our understanding of reconciliation, whether by their presence or absence throughout the history of Christian doctrine? Rather than course through a plethora of theologians to arrive at a sweeping survey of the many variations of these themes, we have confined our scope to three contemporary figures. In their diverse approaches and conclusions, they have stirred us to consider the nature of God, the Person and work of Christ, the divine purpose for creation, the nature of the obstacle that impedes right relationship, and the contours of human involvement.
Several overall impressions have emerged. Dorothee Solle prophetically challenges us to address the alienation and disempowerment of people by sin, largely in its institutionalized dimension. She summons us to expand our view of reconciliation beyond the narrow confines of privatized piety to include the larger scope of the socio-political milieu. She challenges us to take seriously the quest for personal identity in a technological society where human dignity can become sacrificed on the altar of pragmatic benefits for the powers-that-be.
John Macquarrie elucidates personal being from an existential-ontological perspective, probing ways in which to establish points of contact with the secular world starting from a common base in human experience. He seeks to translate the Gospel into contemporary thought patterns and language that arouse the attention of modern ears all too ready to dismiss it as irrelevant to their lives.
Both Sale and Macquarrie, while taking as their starting point the human person, strive to link the individual quest for identity or self-realization to relationship with God. Solle's treatment of the subject leads her from self-identity to a consideration of God's quest for self-identity. Macquarrie presumes the quest for self-realization and self-transcendence as naturally progressing to a consideration of divine transcendence. Both attempt in different ways to assert the premise that God is the hermeneutic of authentic human personhood.
Despite the merits of their respective contributions, we were impressed with some serious flaws in their underestimation of the human incapacitation caused by sin. This in turn leads them to ascribe a greater capability of the human subject to be involved in the reconciliation process than is biblically justifiable. Moreover, their understandings of the Person of Christ, though taking different forms, share a common deficiency in being insufficiently incarnational. While Solle never attempts to ascribe divinity to the human Jesus, Macquarrie strives to maintain faithfulness with the orthodox tradition. In both instances we see traces of an underlying false dichotomy in that humanity and divinity are, in effect, mutually exclusive categories. To posit one person as simultaneously fully human and fully divine creates an insurmountable logical
tension for them, which can only be seen as compromising the integrity of the genuinely human. Solle's contention that Jesus' representative role is by design merely temporary introduces a functional christology that casts a dubious shadow on the significance of Christ. Insofar as Christ is reduced to a utilitarian means of securing our end of self-fulfillment, we reach a point where we no longer need his services. All of these factors contribute to a rejection of substitution as depersonalizing and a truncated view of representation, positing a limited Representative insufficiently equipped to mediate on both sides of the divine-human divide.
We found in Barth a critical corrective for the more flagrant flaws of &ilk and Macquarrie while steering clear of the troublesome shoals of traditional substitutionary views. We perceived a key element in Barth's treatment as being his trinitarian doctrine of God and the consistency with which he brings a triune perspective into every area of doctrine. This liberates his understanding of reconciliation from narrowly constricted legal categories, placing it in a covenantal, filial framework more consonant with the biblical portrayal. We noted the priority he places on the hypostatic union and its central significance in interpreting the atoning work of Christ in terms of a double movement. It also enabled us to comprehend how Christ's humanity as the elected humanity of the Creator Word could have ontological connections with the whole of humanity. Barth's emphasis on the need to interpret the atonement in light of the incarnation, insisting that Who atones determines what is effected in atonement, highlights the necessity of holding Christ's representative humanity together with his substitutionary acts in our place. Since it is God as the human Jesus who atones in and through his humanity, reconciliation can never be a matter of securing "benefits" detachable from the Person of Christ. Correspondingly, since the humanity of Jesus is no other than the humanity of the atoning God, reconciliation fails to reach its mark if the divinity of the Mediator is traded off in the interests of preserving the authenticity of his humanity. Participation in the fully divine, fully human Person of Christ, who is himself the reconciliation of God and humankind--the One in whom the covenant is fulfilled from both divine and human sides--constitutes and reveals God's faithfulness to Godself and God's good purposes for creation.
Viewed from the intensely relational perspective anchored in the triune Being of God, both representation and substitution are required to do justice to the reconciling act of God in Christ for us. Representation without substitution promotes a Pelagian or semi-Pelagian agenda that militates against the biblical attestation to humankind's terminal state and need for deliverance from beyond ourselves. While attempting to express an important human dimension of reconciliation, substitutionless representation lacks an adequate account of the
priority and necessity of God's gracious acts toward humankind--the God-humanward movement--to liberate us for response. On the other hand, while sounding the strong note of God's sovereign act of deliverance toward us, substitution without representation, too, proves deficient on its own, lacking a corresponding awareness of the vital human-Godward dimension of Jesus' vicarious mission in rendering obedient response to God on our behalf. Both substitutionless representation and representationless substitution, though imbalanced in opposite ways, betray the common element of an insufficiently incarnational base, which greatly impoverishes the meaning and scope of God's reconciling act in Christ for us.
The irony is that in seeking to safeguard Christ's genuine humanity, thus avoiding docetism, Salle and Macquarrie have, in fact, introduced a subtle docetism in that God merely masquerades as the eternally gracious God represented by Christ. In challenging the incarnational realism of Jesus' Person as simultaneously fully divine and fully human, they cast God's humanity under the cloak of illusion. In so doing, the grace of God's incarnate self-giving, in effect, becomes a mask evacuated of its reality. Solle's portrayal of Jesus as temporal Representative of humankind and God proves, by the "expiration date" placed on such representation, to be a misrepresentation of the eternal Being of God, for whom no such limits can be accurately representative. For Macquarrie, the misrepresentation comes at the beginning of his christological development. Presenting a Jesus who only gradually transcends into divine identity, Macquarrie places the delimiting disjuncture at the outset. Whether at the end or the beginning, by punctuating Jesus' role (Salle) or Jesus' ontological identity (Macquarrie) as Representative of the eternal God, both theologians have selectively disattended the biblically-attested actuality of grace as it has come to us in Jesus. By asserting that God only temporarilyinvests
Godself in Jesus until self-identity, on both human and divine planes, is attained, or, that God only eventually invests Godself fully in Jesus at the end of Jesus' earthly career, have they not tampered with the very core of the Gospel of grace? In either case, they portray perspectives which defy God's eternal covenantal decision from before the foundation of the world to express God's eternal Being in temporal terms by becoming fully human while not ceasing to be fully divine. By allowing time to condition the parameters of Jesus' identity and atoning purpose, they have introduced an interruption into God's eternal intention and gracious self-commitment to bind Godself wholly and unconditionally in unbroken solidarity as one of us. In proceeding from anthropocentric starting points, they have, in effect, reversed the eternal-temporal relation, ascribing to time the illegitimate role of judging and delimiting what is eternally real--God's eternal decision to be gracious by taking humankind irrevocably into God's divine life. Seeking to safeguard Jesus' full humanity, they have fatally jeopardized it by subordinating the actual Person beneath the facade of what he symbolizes, wherein Jesus' real humanity as the uncompromised humanity of God becomes swallowed up by a devouring caricature of the human Jesus, artificially severing asunder what God has hypostatically joined through the incarnational event. We are left with an unavoidably docetic distortion of the Creator God who graciously deigns to be fully and unreservedly like us as the human Jesus, whereby the eternal triune resolve degenerates into the temporal putting on and taking off of human nature like a mask. Ironically, this becomes in the end a "masquerade" of the eternal grace of God's self-giving, masking the very heart of the Gospel--the Word-made-flesh--behind a dangerous charade of deception.
Both the human-Godward and the God-humanward dimensions conveyed by the concepts of representation and substitution are indispensable to a proper, biblically grounded understanding of reconciliation and must be held together. To press the atoning Person and work of Christ into the falsely dichotomous mold of being either Representative or Substitute distorts the biblical portrayal and truncates the full glory of the Gospel of grace. It diminishes the full significance of the incarnation as the unprecedented event of God coming as human to accomplish for us from within human nature what we could not (but must) do, ushering us into that for which we were destined: a life of intimate union and communion with the triune God. In light of Jesus' inclusive representative humanity, substitution is not depersonalizing but "repersonalizing--eminently personal. The grace of representative substitution is not merely concerned with meeting certain legal requirements but with mediating vital union through the Spirit with the Risen, Living Lord, in whom our reconciled being is both present reality and eschatological hope.
Christ for us as Representative and Substitute--it is the ground and grammar of the Christian life. It is the proclamation of liberation from the oppressive burden of endless striving to "measure up" to an impossibly high standard in order to merit divine approval. It is the joyful realization that the much-yearned-for re-personalization of our beings is not a tantalizing ideal inaccessibly remote from us, but the "truest" truth of our being in the Living Christ now. Enabled by the indwelling Spirit to participate in what Christ has already done for us, we are set free to correspond to such reconciling grace through a life of daily discipleship in grateful union with the One who lived, died and ever lives again on our behalf and in our place.
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