American Gods: The Tenth Anniversary Edition

Before I truly get started on my review of American Gods by Neil Gaiman, I should mention a few things. First off, I was struck in awe and wonderment at being able to read the works of such a master wordsmith. Neil Gaiman is a craftsman when it comes to words. His prose, while not overly flowery, has a depth of emotion and poetry that is a joy to read.Secondly, I benefitted greatly from a website that compiled and explained the mythology behind various gods and characters. If you decide to read this book, may I highly recommend bookmarking and referencing "Only The Gods Are Real?" [...]Trust me when I say you will appreciate the way Gaiman weaves metaphor and mythology so much MORE when you understand the stories he's drawing from. The way he describes the gods and the situations he places them in is nothing short of brilliant.American Gods is a really large elephant of a book. It's been a few days since I've finished reading this novel, and I'm still trying to wrap my head around all of the various concepts and layers. When I focus on one aspect of the book, the others seem to fade out of reach in my mind.They're still there, but slightly out of view. Then, as I shift my attention to another angle of the story, the original thought recedes and goes out of focus. I realize that they're all connected and inter-related, but being able to explain precisely how it all fits is a challenge that seems beyond my scope and ability. In the end, I've been left with a sense of enormity and magnificence, while still not managing to see the whole beast at once.So, then, let's look at the components separately, instead.+++American Gods is a story about a man named Shadow Moon.+++Shadow Moon is a man who was sentenced to six years in jail and is due to be released early for good behavior after only serving three of them. A few days before he's to be freed, his life is shattered when he finds out that his wife has died in a car crash.On his way home, to attend his wife's funeral, he meets a man named Mr. Wednesday. Mr. Wednesday wants to hire him on as his bodyguard and all around errand boy. Originally, Shadow declines the offer, but Mr. Wednesday is insistent and eventually Shadow acquiesces- with a few stipulations.From the very beginning, Shadow can tell that things are not all as they seem. At first, he's reluctantly sucked into the events that unfold, but as things progress he becomes more willingly engaged. He comes to understand that there is a storm coming. There will be a great battle between old and new gods, and that Mr. Wednesday, who is really Odin in disguise, is at the heart of the events unfolding.Much like the skin of an elephant, this is perhaps the easiest aspect of the story to identify. It is roughened by age and elements and yet still manages to be intriguing and comforting. Even if all you wanted to do was read this book on the surface level, it would be an entertaining and pleasant read.+++American Gods is a story about the struggle between old and new.+++Odin is the greatest Norse God, otherwise known as the All-Father. Immigrants brought the old gods from all over the world to America in their hearts and minds. Gods have come from China, Greece, India, Ireland, Egypt, and anywhere there were people who prayed and kept faith in a higher being.Slaves, paupers, peasants all brought them oversea and across land on their backs and then tethered them within America's borders through sacrifice and worship. As the people who believed in them stopped believing, or teaching the new generations, or as they began to die off, the power of the old gods faded.The old gods were left to fend for themselves and take what little bit they could from the mythology and stories that remained. They had to resort to lying, cheating, whoring and preying on the people as best they could for their existence.Their diminished power made way for new gods. The gods of credit cards and freeways, television and computers, internet and media, modernization and progress.What the new gods have not realized (or maybe they suspect and fear it's truth) is that everything is impermanent and their very existence is still inherently based off the belief that people instill in them.As time moves forward, they will find themselves in a similar situation as the old gods. The lingo may be different, but the function is the same. The new gods fear that there isn't enough room in the people's hearts and minds for all of them, and so want to kill off the old gods.+++American Gods is a story about religion and the role of gods in our society.+++Gaiman delves into the roles that religion has played in all cultures around the world. At one point in the book, Mr. Wednesday says, "There's never been a true war that wasn't fought between two sets of people who were certain they were in the right."How can anybody say this isn't relevant to today's geopolitical situation? With so much unrest in the Middle East and the blooming of the Arab Spring? With Iran rushing to gain nuclear capabilities and threatening to wipe Israel off the map; Israel threatening to train their weapons on Iran in retaliation. With the ethnic cleansing and genocide in Sudan and the Darfur?Hasn't it always been the same throughout our history? These are relatively recent examples, but at any point in mankind's past, there is a religion being used as an excuse to wage war and commit murder on masses of people who are different and equally- fervently- calling themselves "right."Throughout humanity, gods have been thought of as, "a dream, a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms...a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business, or marriage thrives, prospers, and triumphs over all opposition."The vehicle used to express the idea of God (or gods) is through religion. Religions are, by definition, a metaphor. They are a means to relate the story and concept. At one point in the book religion is described as an operating system.However, if you were to boil any religion down to its base, you'd be left with the concept that, in essence, gods are ideas. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, it's true, but they can be killed and, therefore, it is possible to kill a god.+++American Gods is a story about the American identity.+++When Gaiman wrote this book, he'd been living in America for a few years and was trying to come to an understanding about our country's sense of identity. In his search, he takes the reader from Chicago to San Francisco to the smallest towns via back roads and kitschy tourist attractions. He addresses his findings and musing throughout the book and makes some very astute observations. Not exactly as a stranger, but not quite as an insider, either.At one point Mr. Wednesday mentions, "This is the only country in the world that worries about what it is." Which, in my own limited experience, is exactly true. Throughout our history we've fretted over the influx of a particular demographic. Long ago, it was the Irish, then the Chinese. We've fought ourselves bloody over slavery and civil rights and interned our Japanese. A more modern example may be the laws recently passed in Arizona, primarily focusing on Hispanics.Each era, we have questioned ourselves and what it means to be American. The ones who have been here longer wrap themselves in the flag and gorge themselves on apple pie, all the while tucking away their own immigrant ancestors. The fact is, nobody is American. Not originally. And, that is entirely the point.One of the things I'm most proud of is my family heritage. My mom is caucasian. Blonde haired and blue eyed, her family has been in America since the 1700s and originated from England (I think there may be a bit of Irish and French in the mix, as well.) My maternal lineage could be considered one of the oldest families in America and has so many branches it's nearly impossible to keep track of them all.In contrast, my dad is full blooded Thai and first generation American. It was my grandparents who immigrated back in the 1940s in order to attend university and eventually make lives for themselves. I love the fact that I am a combination of some of the oldest Americans and newest Americans. I feel like I am the true embodiment of what it means to be American because of these two aspects. It's helped me to have a greater appreciation for our immigrant nature and realized that everybody who comes to this country has had a hand in shaping it's heritage AND it's future.I consider myself to be very patriotic. I still get a lump in my throat when I hear the national anthem hit that high note of hope and aspiration. I still marvel at the brilliance of the fireworks on the Fourth of July. And I insist on representing my country as best as I can when I go traveling abroad; choosing not to hide behind a Canadian flag simply because I'm afraid people will think less of me because of my country's reputation and propensity for war.However, that's not to say that I haven't been critical of our government and foreign policies. That doesn't mean that I haven't marched and protested and written multiple letters to Congress. I think a major part of the American identity is the fact that we DO have a tendency towards self-reflection; of constantly looking in the mirror and asking, "Who are we?"Despite our disparate pasts, cultures, languages and religions, how do we manage to make this country (that doesn't seem like it should work) function and persist? Even as we question our heritage, our language, our "American-ness" we have some undefined quality that makes us distinguishable from any other country.+++American Gods is a story about an elephant.+++Have you ever heard the story of the seven blind men in a room with an elephant? They are all asked to touch some part of the elephant and then to describe what it looks like.The first blind man touches the elephant's leg and says, "An elephant is like a pillar."The second blind man touches the elephant's tail and says, "No, an elephant is like a snake."A third blind man touches the elephant's trunk and says, "No, it's like a tree branch."The fourth blind man touches the elephant's ear and says, "An elephant is like a hand fan."And so on, down the line, each blind man grabs hold of a part of the elephant and declares what it is.In the end, they were all right, and yet...they were all wrong, as well. The fact was, the elephant was too large of a concept for any one man to grasp wholly. Some things are just larger than us and not meant to be fully understood.To fight over things we can't possibly know, such as what the exact parameters are in order to be defined as "American," or over the will of God and the rules of higher beings, is an exercise in futility, ignorance and arrogance. Such is the impression I'm left with after reading American Gods by Neil Gaiman.+++Epilogue+++At the risk of mixing metaphors, or adding to this already bloated review, I'll leave you with one final quote from the book that I hope will help illuminate what I think is the essence of this book."One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless. The tale is the map that is the territory. You must remember this." - The Notebooks of Mr. Ibis.This is my version of a map. I've tried to make it as accurate as possible, but in the end it is incomplete and inaccurate- as all maps must be- in describing this book. The best that anyone can do would be to just read the novel and find themselves as enchanted as I was with the landscape of Gaiman's novel.

In American Gods, traditions linger and refuse to fade, gods are spawned by the handed-down thoughts of immigrants, and belief and reality are one and the same thing. This is a novel about the soul of America, and the heart of the modern world, with maybe just a tad of how our past shaped us, all told through a cast of characters that's as offbeat and well developed as it is numerous.Gaiman's themes here are weighty, and they could drag off and drown your average narrative with their importance. Gaiman doesn't even try to fight this; he lets the book be tossed to and fro, gyrating wildly and leaping off into tangents in order to explore part after part of his post-mythology mythos. As such, though the story is interesting on its own, and the character's usually well drawn, this is more a novel about America and its synthesis than it is about anything else.The gods were brought here by the immigrants (the Irish leprechaun upon ships during the days of famine; the pixies and their ilk from English prisoners; Odin from exploratory and bloodthirsty Viking longboats; the Egyptian pantheon of Anubis, Thoth, Horus, Bast settling in New Egypt; Anansi from - well, you get the idea) but things have changed, and, in the process of acclimatization, the believers became American, and the gods were cut loose. Now, as time moves on, their belief and traditions are fading fast towards zero, and the old deities are desperate to not simply drop out of existence.Now, in this new world, the actual facets of the gods' being are no longer important, the funeral director gods of death are as on the verge as a New York City djinn, and all that still matters is where they came from and whether they still exist at all:"'I have a brother. They say, you put us together, we are like one person, you know? When we are young, his hair, it is very blonde, very light, his eyes are blue, and people say, he is the good one. And my hair is very dark, darker than yours even, and people say I am the rogue, you know? I am the bad one. And now time passes, and my hair is gray. His hair, too, I think is gray. And you look at us, you would not know what was light and who was dark.'" (p. 79)Simplification is not the only change brought on by the passage of years. The majority of Gods in the book fall into one of two pathways. The first try - in vain? - to recreate the glory days, always striving to remember. The world, however, has moved on, and their attempts frequently become depressingly comical, as they try to assert their dominance over a world that has forgotten them, such as Eoster, trying to claim that she's still beloved due to the name of the holiday. In many cases, being the American incarnation of these gods, they don't even have a period of power to look back upon, such as Czernobog who cannot even contemplate his days as a dark god anymore and is able to do nothing else but dream about his years in a slaughterhouse.The other potential path is a darker one still, and it is one that we are introduced to at the end of the very first chapter: the perversion of everything that the god once held holy. The Queen of Sheba has become a prostitute. Even that, however, is not far enough. In a twisted incarnation of her need for belief, she forcers her forces her lovers to worship her and sexually devours them for sustenance. Her words hold true for her and for the array of similarly striving gods we glimpse in the narrative: "There is nothing holy in [my] profession. Not anymore." (p. 373)But is the decline of the gods really such a bad thing? In one part of the story, we see a funeral home run by the Egyptian gods of death. They provide a more personal touch, a send off by something with more of a soul than the mechanical filling of orders provided by a big funeral company. In another subplot, we get to see a community still run and safeguarded by a supernatural being. The community's exterior is enticing and gleaming, which hides the sacrifice needed to maintain it.Is such a thing worth it for a more ordered world? Has our modern world of machines and computers destroyed wonder and human contact? It's impossible to truly a question like that, and Gaiman doesn't. American Gods is not a narrative of answers, but rather a tapestry of questions. You will never get a definitive answer of how the gods interact with mortals; you will never know whether the old gods were right to fight for their survival; you will never know whether the gods will one day be gone completely. But you don't need to know. In American Gods, Gaiman asks the questions, and I think that every reader will have their own answers.The sprawling nature of the themes, and the narration's tendency to leap after them wherever they may go, leads to an incredibly meandering text. Our main character Shadow, who is roped into the conflict as the assistant to Mr. Wednesday only hours after leaving prison. While it seems, at first, that the two are working towards a definite goal, Shadow is soon sent off to location after location without any discernible rhyme or reason.Further complicating matters - if you're a fan of anything even approaching linier plots - are the interludes, taken from the modern incarnation of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. These stories feature brand new characters, often separated from the main narrative by spans of decades, living their lives and either interacting with or contributing to the nature of the various scattered American deities.Somehow, Gaiman pulls all of this off. The trick is, I think, his intuitive grasp of character. He only need mention a name and spout a few lines of dialogue and, poof, a fully grown man appears on the stage. Each interlude feels complete enough to form its own text, and each adds to the main narrative in immeasurable ways.And yet, this grasp of character is not applied to one character. Shadow, whose eyes we spend the vast majority of the book looking out of, is told:'You're not dead'" she said. 'But I'm not sure that you're alive, either. Not really.'[...]'I love you,' she said dispassionately. 'You're my puppy. But [...] You're like this big, solid, man-shaped hole in the world.' She frowned. 'Even when we were together. I love being with you. You adored me, and you would do anything for me. But sometimes I'd go into a room and I wouldn't think there was anybody in there. And I'd turn the lights on, or I'd turn the lights off, and I'd realize that you were in there, sitting on your own, not reading, not watching TV, not doing anything.'" (p. 370-371)After his release from prison, and the death of his wife, Shadow retreats into himself, and it is rare for the reader to get a glimpse inside. This leads to a good portion of the book feeling aimless, as we're cast about in Shadow's wake, without him even knowing - or caring - where he's going. The reader that is willing to follow will eventually come to realize that Shadow's recalcitrance is not shallowness, but, in order to get to that point, you need to be willing to follow Gaiman on all of his digressions.On the subject of the book's prose, Gaiman says in the included interview: "I wanted to write American Gods in what I thought of as an American style - clean, simple, uncluttered - and push the narrator further into the background than I had in previous books. But the narrator crept out in the "coming to America" chapters, where I got to play with a wider set of voices." (p. 596)It's true that the writing is more subdued than it is in Neverwhere or Anansi Boys, the plot less self aware. But this is still a Gaiman novel, and it's still filled with the delicious idiosyncrasies of language that characterize all of the man's writing. There are sections here that are jaw dropping in their grandeur, and there are sections that are laugh out loud funny, and both build with the other to create a wry and majestic experience, filled with larger than life characters who are anything but above sarcasm.American Gods looks like a simple read on the surface. Underneath, you soon come to realize the depth that is packed into every scene and every single glance. This is a book that is impossible to really predict, so come to it and get ready to be swept along. While occasionally directionless, American Gods is simply something that needs to be experienced. This is not the most entertaining book that I've read of Gaiman, but it is undoubtedly the best.

Not because it’s a bad book, but I had it on a tablet that i only used while getting tattooed. There was a stretch where my artist wasn’t around for a few years so I started over, and Then after Covid and the lockdown I got rid of that tablet and when I again went to get ink I couldn’t remember where I was or what was happening. So I started over for the last time. I bought back up quickly and couldn’t stop. I started reading it while working out, and it’s become a bit of a routine and I’m sad it’s over because the world he creates with this story is awesome. I’ve read all the sandman material and this book was just as enthralling and awesome. There’s a reason it won a bunch of awards, five stars, give it a chance if you’ve got the time.

最初の200ページは引き込まれますが、中盤がひたすら進行がノロく、これは流石に長いよ！と思いながら読んでました。一応、最後にオチはつくので読後体験は悪くないです。ただ、著者の作品を初めて手に取るなら、墓場の少年かグッドオーメンズの方をおすすめします。

What a surprising great book. Of course not perfect, but what book is, still an amazing read which I highly recommend.

I like the story, it links the current world with the gods bring by the people from the old world to the new world.

Bought it following the big hype train it rode on and ended up getting off half-way through the book. It was boring and practically non-engaging. The stories told are completely random and not very well inter-woven. It was definitely a waste of money.

模範囚として三年間の服役を終え、愛する妻の元へ帰るはずの Shadow に悲報が届く。再会を目前にして、彼女が交通事故で死亡したというのだ。失意の中、我が家へと戻る途中の彼の前に、「Wednesday」と名乗る男が現れ、Shadow を助手として雇いたいと持ちかける。更に埋葬されたはずの妻が再び Shadow の前に姿を…。「Wednesday」の正体はこの語源を知っていればすぐにわかるのですが、そういった説明は作中では明確にはされません。全体的に、北欧神話やエジプト神話・スラブ神話くらいは、読者が知っていることを前提に書かれているような感じです。知らなくても楽しめるのでしょうが、若干、意味不明の部分が残るかもしれません。新旧の神々の戦いという題材のわりに、派手さはそれほどありません。ですが、現実と幻想が交錯する不思議な感じがとても魅力的な小説です。人間社会で地道に生計をたてる、しょぼくれた感じの古き神々がイイ味だしてます。また、小道具の使い方や、ちょっとしたエピソードの描写が非常に上手いと感じました。