Reviews for All Souls Day

The average rating for All Souls Day based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-03-18 00:00:00 Eric Bojara Arthur is a citizen of the globe, he has some close friends but he is lonely. And he is obsessed with history. What he found so fascinating about the idea of history was that it was based on a chemical compound of fate, chance, and design. The combination of these three elements produced a chain of events that produced another chain of events, which were said to be inevitable, or random, or to happen according to a secret plan that was not yet known to us, though by now things were getting pretty esoteric. Like Ulysses he travels all over the world and everywhere he goes he takes his camera along and films the present to make it available to the others when it will become the past… Odysseus had been cunning, but not free. Or about as free as he himself was. Our crafty hero had needed to be rescued countless times by Athena, who had come to him in a variety of guises. There she was again - the goddess. But could she still work her magic? …He looked up at the statue of Athena, but her eyes looked right past him. Gods never saw you unless they wanted to. Odysseus had been lucky - someone had pointed him in the right direction. She could have come up with a simpler solution, but it wouldn't have made as good a story. He filmed a scene he'd filmed before, a long sweep beginning with Potsdamer Platz, moving slowly over to the Brandenburg Gate and ending by the Reichstag. One day he encounters a woman, she is a historian, a medievalist - both of them have deep psychological wounds, they are scorched by their past, they attempt to love each other but they live in the present… Where she was headed he didn't know, but he could feel that they were almost there. A door, a man with a shaved head whose face he didn't trust, a mechanical beat coming from downstairs, light from the underworld, unsavory characters leaning against a bar - Gegenmenschen, he called them, a new subspecies of humanity. Their voices didn't sound like those of his friends. They spoke in evil drawls, the language of caves. She seemed to know them, to assume a different voice, a kind of shout to be heard above the music, heavy metal, the sound of a factory producing nothing but noise, pounding figures on a dance floor, slave laborers working on an absent product, contorted bodies moving in time to a merciless beat, writhing with every lash of the whip, screaming along with what they seemed to recognize as words, a German chorus from Hell, raw voices scraped over jagged iron, poisonous metal. Gegenmenschen - people who hated silence. XTC users, speed freaks, cokeheads, vanitas faces with thin bodies in chic rags. There are two worlds: the world of love and the world of hate. Majority of human beings endeavour to live in the world of love but those who live in the world of hate rule…

Review # 2 was written on 2013-08-28 00:00:00 Ian Quigley There are many books that I read in the course of the year and enjoy, some that I enjoy immensely. These books I close with a sigh and indulge in a bit of reflection. Their contents pop up in my thoughts frequently over the next few days - after that, less frequently, but still occasionally stopping by. All Souls Day is not one of those books. All Souls Day is a book which for me finished rather undramatically. There was no moment of reflection. There was an awareness, rather, that the journey it had taken me on had been a journey of moments, becoming clear in intent only towards the end. I also knew that I had no need to reflect briefly, because the words, the story, the characters, the images and the ideas had become embedded in me. No need to have a gentle goodbye. This is a book that will continue on with me. A book that will be one of that rather tiny collection which I will read repeatedly because although they are embedded in me, there is often a need for a reminder, a need to take the journey again. All Souls Day is a book that travels like life itself. As I read along, I felt no desire or need for plot - something of a plot emerged gradually, but the captivating part was the flow of the book itself. I could not stop reading it just as I cannot stop walking through my own life. And yet at times I read it gradually, as if afraid to go too fast, afraid to bring it to a close. Beautiful and full, All Souls Day captures the magic of the everyday - its accomplishment is the same thing that its main character strives to do in his bits of film, the ones he rarely shows any one but keeps for itself. There is so much more that is in this book and I know that each further reading will be just as rich as the first, perhaps even more so. There are explorations of city, of culture and character, and of history and its impact on all of these. The connections among all the different themes becoming clearer as the book progresses, but there is never a lecture or a final conclusion imposed on the reader. The final thought offered is gentle and allows the readers to do with it what they please.