{"id":839,"date":"2012-04-26T20:03:53","date_gmt":"2012-04-26T20:03:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.maryrakow.com\/dev\/dev\/?page_id=839"},"modified":"2019-01-25T01:36:37","modified_gmt":"2019-01-25T01:36:37","slug":"reviews-blurbs","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.maryrakow.com\/dev\/reviews-blurbs\/","title":{"rendered":"reviews & blurbs"},"content":{"rendered":"

This Is Why I Came<\/em><\/h3>\n

\u201cIn 62 very brief tales, she evokes kindred spirits buffeted by a sense of divine implacability\u2026 Rakow\u2019s feat in these fragments is to blend the gnomic and the prosaic, skepticism and wonder.\u201d
\n\u2014Ann Hulbert, The Atlantic<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026Rakow, a theologian who studied at Harvard Divinity School and Boston College..has written with great love and deep faith\u2026The stories are luminous, numinous. Examine it thoroughly. It\u2019s miraculous.\u201d
\n\u2014Lawrence Wood, Christian Century<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026 [F]illed with brief, often poetic recastings of the Old and New Testaments\u2026 Rakow thoughtfully offers sensitive and complex readings that are free of moral thundering\u2026 Rakow doesn\u2019t radicalize the Bible but she does make it more humanistic and poetic\u2026 An affecting flash-fiction reimagining of the Good Book.\u201d
\n\u2014Kirkus<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201c[Rakow has] cast off her academic robe for this delicate work of fiction, which is informed by the most basic human desires and disappointments\u2026.Rakow moves unpredictably from the simple, stark details of the Sunday School versions we know to her own striking emendations and elaborations\u2026.brief as these prose poems are, they\u2019re still capable of arresting moments and startling insights \u2026 the novel is tremendously poignant as it follows the life of Joseph, who speaks no words in the Gospels but finds his voice here.\u201d
\n\u2014Ron Charles, The Washington Post<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cThe outlines of the Bible stories are familiar, but their characters are more rounded, more poignant in Rakow\u2019s spare but poetic telling.\u201d
\n\u2014Clea Simon, Boston Globe<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cI cried when I read Rakow\u2019s chapter 44\u2026in which an aged Mary sets out to paint her son. The passage is absolutely secular, yet spirituality breathes from the depth of love conveyed and the tenderness of the prose itself. Rakow\u2019s prose sings at this register of humanistic truth, infused with the sacred power of language and feeling rather than of the capital-D Divine.\u201d
\n\u2014Courtney Sender, Harvard Divinity Bulletin<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cRakow\u2019s latest novel brims with wildly imagined Bible stories, into which she infused new layers of mystery and mysticism, ambiguity and wonder. In her hands, tales we\u2019ve heard all our lives achieve the miracle of surprise.\u201d
\n\u2014\u201c10 Titles to Pick Up Now\u201d, O Magazine<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cThese stories, both Old and New, are awash in dread and terror and beauty. They aren\u2019t lifeless myths; they are mythic stories once again given flesh and blood.\u201d
\n\u2014Anthony Domestico, Commonweal Magazine<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cThis is Why I Came<\/em> is made salvific by its searching; rather than confronting the fact of human suffering with assertions of light, the novel voyages further into the darkness of essential mystery. Resistant to crystalline denouement and wary of firm answers, it beautifully bares the ragged edges of uncertainty. In cracking open ancient texts and considering them anew, Rakow insists on the value in still grappling with those ageless, unresolvable matters\u2014questions of where we came from, and why, and how we might be now that we are here.\u201d
\n\u2014Lara Palmquist, Ploughshares<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cI did not think it was possible but Mary Rakow has made the \u2018greatest stories ever told\u2019 even better. This is Why I Came<\/em> is a beautifully wrought book you won\u2019t be able to put down\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2014Reza Aslan, author of No god but God<\/em><\/a> and Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cThis Is Why I Came<\/em> is a remarkable and remarkably unclassifiable book. Neither revisionist text, nor compendium of Bible tales made palatable to post-modern sensibilities, Rakow\u2019s scripture (what else can I call it?) is an entirely new creation. These holy narratives aren\u2019t summoned forward to meet us in our present time and place. Instead, it is us she coaxes back to the when of the events as they occur. And in this book, they do occur. There is no metaphor here. A miracle is exactly that. And miracles don\u2019t always end well. Mary Rakow has written through (and against and underneath and between) the stories we already know\u2014or think we know. Her cadence is incantatory. The wisdom, ancient. This is a book of great and dangerous grace.\u201d
\n\u2014Jill Alexander Essbaum, New York Times<\/em> bestselling author of\u00a0Hausfrau<\/em><\/a> and The Devastation<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cIn these few exquisite pages, Rakow strips the skin of centuries from the central narratives of Western Culture, exposing the rawly human in all our grief and yearning. She portrays religion not as refuge, as gift, but as an arena of mistakes, passion and error, delusion\u2013the profoundly disruptive encounter with God. An inflammatory, Blakean tour de force.\u201d
\n\u2014Janet Fitch, author of Paint it Black<\/em><\/a> and White Oleander<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cThere are some novels that are nearly impossible to describe, that eviscerate us with their power and resonance. Mary Rakow\u2019s, This is Why I Came<\/em>, gathers ancient stories like worn and dried kindling, and ignites them with a blue incandescent light. The smoke catching in my lungs, my eyes wet and red. Yet I stayed to be warmed by this new, uttering transfixing reinvention of the stories of the Bible. Through the poetry of her phrases I stood breast to breast, hearts beating, breathing the same scented air as those who have been trapped within the pages. I felt unyielding love of the two Mary\u2019s, the vessel and the whore; the blood spattered on stone\u2014the humanity and divinity of a questioning, complex Jesus and his disciples, and so much more. Rakow has indeed created the Newest Testament. I will never look at Scripture in quite the same way.\u201d
\n\u2014Cynthia Bond, author of Ruby<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cThis lean volume filled my soul. Rapturously beautiful, tender, complex, Mary Rakow has written sentences and entire passages you need to read aloud to really hear the symphony of language. You can debate the message of This Is Why I Came<\/em>, but you must acknowledge its wisdom.\u201d
\n\u2014Samantha Dunn, author of Not By Accident<\/em><\/a> and Failing Paris<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cWho would dare re-imagine the stories of the Bible? Mary Rakow, that\u2019s who. Author of a brilliant debut novel, The Memory Room<\/em>, a Harvard Divinity School graduate gifted with the ear of a poet, Rakow\u2019s long awaited second novel, This Is Why I Came<\/em> is unusual, effortlessly lyrical and philosophically direct. The product of someone, rare in our time, who seems possessed of a biblical imagination. That the novel is controversial and culturally timely is clear, entering the current belief\/disbelief debate in an intimate and original way. Yet the novel gifts us with far more than that. It is a ticket into a dream where the opaque feels transparent again, the shallow, profound and the presumed irrelevance of biblical characters, including God himself, is explored. In place of this rumor of our shared smallness, the transcendent quality of the world, of the ordinary, feels not only possible but logical, natural and true. As I read the last page, I was caught up in a trance where new meanings and understanding found a place to take flight.\u201d
\n\u2014David Francis, author of Stray Dog Winter<\/em><\/a> and The Great Inland Sea<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cIn a gorgeous melding of fable, theology, and poetry, Mary Rakow offers us versions of Bible stories that restore the gift of those stories\u2019 strangeness, which is to say their deep humanness. This disquieting, consoling novel is a book of questions, a book of doors: a companion for the long night of our unknowing.\u201d
\n\u2014Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You<\/em><\/a> and Mitko<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cThere is an entire subgenre of serious modern fiction that focuses on Jesus and other characters from the New Testament. Nikos Kazantzakis, Jos\u00e9 Saramago, Par Lagerkvist, Norman Mailer, Jim Crace, Colm Toibin, C. K. Stead: The list is long. It\u2019s also mostly male, though recent books by Naomi Alderman, Mich\u00e8le Roberts and Mary Rakow have begun to right the gender imbalance.\u201d
\n\u2014Christian Wiman, review of Lars Petter Sveen\u2019s \u201cChildren of God\u201d\u00a0\u00a0The New York Times Book Review<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cWe think we know the Bible. We think we know these old stories like we know our bodies. But Rakow explores the silences in these texts imagining realities yet undreamt. The startling result is her long-awaited second novel, This Is Why I Came<\/em>. Boldly and reverently she collapses time in her treatment of these biblical figures, grows forms and lifts the framework so that word becomes breath. She calls us to envision consciousness not enclosed in our heads or the spine of a book, even an ancient, and to many, a sacred book, but to celebrate it as alive, in constant interaction. This is what we look for in art. A vision that adds to the quality of our own consciousness, that breaks through reality as we know it. Our transfiguration.If all great art is praise, as she asserts, quoting Ruskin on her website, then This Is Why I Came<\/em> is praise of the most high. In the first chapter, she imagines Adam as the Maker, driven to despair because he cannot make the form he longs to see, the form that will tell him who he is. In this, Rakow succeeds where her Adam failed. Through her protagonist Bernadette, she has made a new form that tells us who we are. In her hands, words become cups of light and symbols are given their potential to reveal, again and anew, what it is to be human.\u201d
\n\u2014Julianne Ortale, editor of Women on the Edge<\/em><\/a>
\nand Music for Incurables<\/em>, currently under review.<\/p>\n

The Memory Room<\/em><\/h3>\n

\u201cOnce you have read the last line and closed the cover, the world will not look quite the same. This is fiction as art, the page as canvas.\u201d
\n\u2013Sam Dunn, author of\u00a0Failing Paris\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0Not By Accident<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cIn her suspenseful, poetic, mysterious and profound novel\u00a0The Memory Room,<\/em>\u00a0Mary Rakow addresses the big questions–how do we live with our knowledge of evil? \u00a0And then what do we do with this knowledge, and how can we reconcile it with an equally profound awareness of the depth \u00a0of the world’s beauty and the possibility of faith? \u00a0Approaching these fundamental issues not as a philosopher but as an artist using a subtle poet’s touch, she explores the great paradoxes of the human condition without simplification or denial. \u00a0The Memory Room<\/em>\u00a0\u00a0marks the rarest of occurrences\u2014the debut of a literary master.\u201d
\n\u2013Janet Fitch, author of\u00a0White Oleander\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0Paint It Black<\/em><\/p>\n

“Powerfully imagined and profoundly insightful.”
\n\u2013Kirkus Review<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I became aware that this book would be threading Paul Celan’s words all throughout its own texture, I wondered if an American novel’s contemporary language and concerns could sustain those of a tragic, brilliant Holocaust survivor. \u00a0But I needn’t have worried. \u00a0Mary Rakow has seamlessly, subtly composed her own memory fugue, distant from Celan yet profoundly connected.\u00a0 It\u2019s at once intense and crystalline on every page.\u201d
\n\u2013John Felstiner, author of\u00a0Paul Celan, Poet, Survivor, Jew<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan<\/em><\/p>\n

“Haunting and profound,\u00a0The Memory Room<\/em>\u00a0refracts personal history and puts it back together as powerful art. Reading this utterly unique\u2014and very surprising\u2014novel, is like being awake 150 consecutive nights, watching, exquisite brushstroke by brushstroke, the painting of a mural depicting the navigation of a human soul through the transcendent severities of love, unspeakable loss, exhaustive and bold questioning of beauty and faith itself. \u00a0Mary Rakow has written a daring, brilliant book.\u201d
\n\u2013Howard Norman, author of \u00a0The Museum Guard\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0The Haunting of L<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cIt is the moral seriousness of Rakow\u2019s book, as much as the literary inventiveness, that elevates her work to the realm of literature.\u201d
\n\u2013Jonathan Kirsch,\u00a0\u201cArt After Auschwitz\u201d\u00a0The\u00a0Los Angeles Times.<\/em><\/p>\n

“With subtlety, restraint and an extraordinary eye for detail, Rakow has constructed a breathtaking debut that avoids the clich\u00e9s of abuse narratives as it tests the boundaries of prose and poetry…. Drawing from the Psalms and the poems of Paul Celan, Rakow has written a novel that distills the mysteries of suffering, faith and salvation into a complex yet accessible whole. The horror of her tale is ultimately redressed by the sensitivity and skill with which it is told.”
\n\u2013Publishers Weekly<\/em>, starred review.<\/p>\n

Read more in Testimonials<\/a><\/p>\n

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This Is Why I Came \u201cIn 62 very brief tales, she evokes kindred spirits buffeted by a sense of divine implacability\u2026 Rakow\u2019s feat in these fragments is to blend the gnomic and the prosaic, skepticism and wonder.\u201d \u2014Ann Hulbert, The Atlantic \u201c\u2026Rakow, a theologian who studied at Harvard Divinity School and Boston College..has written with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"template-fullpage.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-839","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maryrakow.com\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/839","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maryrakow.com\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maryrakow.com\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.maryrakow.com\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.maryrakow.com\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=839"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/www.maryrakow.com\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/839\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1445,"href":"https:\/\/www.maryrakow.com\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/839\/revisions\/1445"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maryrakow.com\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}