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Gods Without Men

3.65 of 5 stars 3.65 · rating details · 1,349 ratings · 270 reviews

"2008. The California desert. A four-year-old austistic boy, Raj Matharu, disappears in the winderness plunging his wealthy New York parents in to the surreal public hell of a media witch-hunt. But the desert is inexplicable and miraculous, and the Matharus' fate is bound up with that of others: a debauched British rock star, on the run from a failed relationship and the s...more

Paperback, 383 pages

Published August 4th 2011 by Hamish Hamilton

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Sep 20, 2012 FrankH rated it 4 of 5 stars

The title is lifted from text in a Honore Balzac short story, but the vibration here -- resonating with themes embracing UFO-ology, quant stock-trading models, cultural clashes and all manner of odd latter-day convergences -- is a long way from 19th century France. In another, more recent era, Gods Without Men might have been labeled 'druggy', edgy, Pynchon-like; today, the author Kunzru seems to be saying, we don't need the drugs to induce the drug-induced consciousness: Just start connecting t...more The title is lifted from text in a Honore Balzac short story, but the vibration here -- resonating with themes embracing UFO-ology, quant stock-trading models, cultural clashes and all manner of odd latter-day convergences -- is a long way from 19th century France. In another, more recent era, Gods Without Men might have been labeled 'druggy', edgy, Pynchon-like; today, the author Kunzru seems to be saying, we don't need the drugs to induce the drug-induced consciousness: Just start connecting the dots in this crazy world -- through history, across nations, from the pop clutter in our daily lives -- and we'll be off on our 'trip'.

The narrative, which oscilates across a concentration of dates spanning centuries from the time of the Spanish Conquistadors, is unified by a piece of geography in the Mojave Desert, a mountainous rock formation called the Three Pinnacles, presented suggestively as -- take your pick, multiple choice allowed -- a divine gateway between life and death, a portal for outer space aliens or, at the least, a latency-producing, geophysical power source. Each temporal section has its own orientation to the Rocks and to sets of characters, with some overlap; from the 1920s, for instance, we get Deighton, the ethnologist, and his wife studying local indigenous American tribes; in the forties and fifties, there's Schmidt, settling in to look for extra-terrestrails than can bridge the Cold War divide, followed later by Joanie, Judy, Dawn and the other 'saucer people' arriving to make contact with the 'Ashtar Galactic Command'. And, in the new century, the author gives us Laila, a distraught, teenage Iraqi ex-pat, recruited by U.S. government to participate in post-invasion military exercises at the Pinnacles -- as role-playing Iraqi insurgents (beheading events included!). The core narrative in the group, however, is the post-millenial story of Jaz Matharu, a youngish Punjabi software quant working in New York, his bookish Jewish wife Lisa and their autistic four-year-old son Raj whose high-maintenance behavioral problems threaten the marriage. A 'healing vacation' finds them out there on the desert Rocks but then Raj goes missing -- does he wander off, suffer at the hands of a kidnapper, human or otherwise, or simply disappear? As the prolonged, unsuccessful search for the boy turns into a vituperative media circus, Lisa and Jaz fall into a hell of connubial guilt and blame.

Too much 'fringe' for your taste? Across the timelines, the correlations, linkages -- what Jaz call 'rhymes' -- begin to add up. Was the glowing boy befriended by Judy in 1957, just before her disappearance, the same glowing boy fathered in the twenties by the native American Mockingbird Runner, the lover of Eliza, Deighton's wife? Is this linked somehow to the glow seen by Laila during the war games in 2009? And if the quants like Jaz can find a relationship in 2009 between Southwestern home repossesions and the number of avatars in Asian on-line game worlds, who are we to ridicule the moon-beamers from an earlier time? Kunzru uses the plight of the Matharus as the emotional center of the novel, then weaves in the off-beat events, characters and themes by going back and forth, linking them across the sections to make the ever-deepening connections to the main story. And it's the author's pitch-perfect attention to the detail in each piece that binds the credible with the incredible, the fringe with the prosaic. Take the zany, delusional quality of UFO tribe from the fifties, for instance: it's perfectly conveyed by text that self-documents the way semi-technical jargon can gull seekers of knowledge:

The actual circuitry has been designed from the labs or Araltar, the Magnetician for this quadrant..It's based on the violet ray and elemental ray, focused on a crystal whose tip penetrates the sheath of the chamber in which the Oracle is secured. The violet ray is the carrier of the multi-plexed etheric communications...the elemental ray decodes into mental vibrations of a suitable level for processing by the human mind (Was Kunzru a UFO guy in an earlier incarnation?)

But how different is this mumbo-jumbo from the jargon of the talk shows on which Lisa and Jaz appear in 2009, Raj still unfound? The author cunningly demonstrates the way media converts private anguish into public commodity:

We're so glad, Our hearts. Such a difficult. Tell me...Well, Sally he reminded me of my cousin Nate made feel beautiful like a woman you know how important that is for a mom well Sally I'm glad you asked because it was a cry for help you have to appreciate autism affects everyone parents carers we all live with my levels of stress were through the roof.. I know your viewers understand how hard understand how very hard to come here today and admit alcohol drugs obesity gambling abause has been a problem in my life but now with the grace of God and my husband by my side. My husband. My....Jaz shifted in his seat. The host said something. He said something. The host said something else. All eyes were on her; the witch Lisa Matharu, the woman who didn't cry for her son

Later, of course, the UFO community runs afoul of the law in the eighties, as unsavory characters with names like 'Wolf' and 'Coyote' peddle methedrine and hearken us back to the old Indian tales, recorded by Deighton in the twenties, when the desert 'animals became men'. It will be a music album produced by the UFOers and purchased on impulse by Laila at a vinyl record shop in 2008 that winds its way, through a series of correlations, to the denouement with Raj.

Gods Without Men ends with a substantive epilogue that contrives to get the Matharus back out on the Rocks. I found it to be unsatisfying but the interaction between the altered husband and wife that got them there again moving and persuasive.

A crazy, crazy-good novel.
(less)

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Apr 05, 2013 William Thomas rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: post-pynchon, post-vollman, the-new-new-literati

Welcome to the brave new world of literature. Hari Kunzru squeezes himself into the Nu-Nu Literati by beat-boxing out what is mostly snippets of the life stories of, well, one too many people and throws in the odd sci-fi quirk for good measure, just so he can be named in the same sentence as Salman Rushdie when we compare this to something like Shalimar the Clown. Is this what you wanted, Hari? For me to put your name in the post-Gaddis, post-Vollman, post-Pynchon elite? Right there next to that...more Welcome to the brave new world of literature. Hari Kunzru squeezes himself into the Nu-Nu Literati by beat-boxing out what is mostly snippets of the life stories of, well, one too many people and throws in the odd sci-fi quirk for good measure, just so he can be named in the same sentence as Salman Rushdie when we compare this to something like Shalimar the Clown. Is this what you wanted, Hari? For me to put your name in the post-Gaddis, post-Vollman, post-Pynchon elite? Right there next to that worthlessly hyper-modern Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Egan? Or maybe compare this to DFW's Broom of the System. Actually, that one may just be dead-on, that one right there.

Wait a second. Aren't I forgetting the New New crown prince David Mitchell? There. I think I may have gotten all the name comparisons out of the way now. I think.

So, I said this is mainly snippets of the life stories of one-too-many people. That's pretty accurate. What Kunzru does here is play a little game of Six Degrees of Separation- much the same way Egan did in Goon Squad and Mitchell did in Cloud Atlas- and little else. If you're looking for a plot, you'll wind up with literary blue-balls, so don't get into this one if you need a moral or an actual ending with a climax and falling action an this, that an the other. It ain't happening. But, on the bright side, Hari is a fascinating writer and one of the strongest I've ever read in his pitch-perfect characterization. Even though we have 5,6,7,10 whatever number of characters and their perspectives, each individual voice is represented without overlap and without a hint of the others. This is a book with MPD and has no idea that it is housing so many unique voices. And so like the granddaddy of modern lit William Faulkner, Hari abandons a plot for an overall feeling, a mood, captured distinctly in each voice he writes. And like Kafka, it often lays bare the absurdity of our own existence and our interactions with one another.

At the heart of this book, it seems to me, lies a story about the disconnect of every person on earth. That we cannot express ourselves or our feelings or ideas to one another because each of us is trying to convey our own emotions and ideas at the very same time. All of us radio transmitters, none of us receivers. And I liked that. I loved that. Even if I'm wrong about that part, that's something I took from it and loved. Right along with his brilliant inner dialogues and monologues, even if the prose was nowhere near poetic.

Grade: B(less)

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Mar 20, 2012 Danny rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

"I've been through the desert on a horse with no name, it felt good to be out of the rain."

The lyrics to that song might as well be playing in the background as you read Gods Without Men, because it's all about the desert.

In the middle of the Mojave there's a butte topped by three spires of rock called the Pinnacles. It's the sort of a place that has a power all its own, and the characters in this novel find themselves drawn there. Skipping through time, from Spanish missionaries in 1778 to a...more

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Apr 05, 2012 Liviu rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2012_release_read, mainstream, read_2012, t1_recommended_2012

Gods without men is a very fascinating book though it left me a little dissapointed in the end as I expected more coherence.
It is easier to set up an intriguing premise and throw in more and more complications and tantalizing stuff but harder to either bring some sense of completion or just keep things rolling but performing a magic trick on the reader so he or she is happy enough with the local resolutions.
David Mitchell did it in his masterpiece Cloud Atlas to which Gods without men compares -...more

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Aug 12, 2012 Ken Feucht rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

If Hari Kunzru released a sequel to "Gods Without Men," I would read it in a second. I enjoyed reading the stories of several characters across time focused around a rock formation in the Nevada desert. It's just that the stories didn't end. The main story is sold as being about a couple whose son disappears in the desert and returns "changed." The problem is, the son returns in the last sixth of the book. His story is never really explored.

The same is true of a teenaged Iraqi girl whose back st...more

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Mar 26, 2012 switterbug (Betsey) rated it 5 of 5 stars

There’s a sense of both turbulence and utter stillness in Kunzru’s latest novel, and a feeling of vastness and confinement. Spanning 250 years, (non-linearly), the story takes place largely in the xeric and sparsely populated Mojave Desert, at the high-energy Pinnacles, or three-fingered rock formations. The people who populate this novel tend to be restive fringe dwellers, a colorful cast of alien, isolated, and even immortal characters. A Franciscan priest, an anthropologist, hippies, drug add...more There’s a sense of both turbulence and utter stillness in Kunzru’s latest novel, and a feeling of vastness and confinement. Spanning 250 years, (non-linearly), the story takes place largely in the xeric and sparsely populated Mojave Desert, at the high-energy Pinnacles, or three-fingered rock formations. The people who populate this novel tend to be restive fringe dwellers, a colorful cast of alien, isolated, and even immortal characters. A Franciscan priest, an anthropologist, hippies, drug addicts, a yuppie couple with an autistic child, a UFO cult, a fading rock star, the mythical Coyote.

The book opens with a short postcard sketch of the trickster Coyote doing bad, bad things. Coyote, interestingly, has many meanings other than wild dog—a clown, a sorcerer, a despicable person, a divine spirit, a romantic twilight voice on the wind, pirated works. All these meanings are relevant, either figuratively or metaphorically, to this story. The disparate characters from different years venture out or end up at the Pinnacles, where they feel an eerie, powerful force of energy, a transformative and potent, highly charged attraction. What is the meaning of this attraction? Read, seek, wander, believe, or disbelieve, and you will find more questions and demand less answers. The more pages you turn, the deeper you go into Kunzru’s vortex.

The ballast of the story is the Mojave; you will encounter its desert electricity as you read, see billions of stars in an endless sky, breathe life, taste death, smell the secrets of the universe, prick the spirits, absorb the infinite. And just as you are about to touch it, it flees, returns, and seduces.

This is for readers who are dazzled by the elliptical, pursue the intuitive, and relish the unknown. This is an exquisitely interpretive story where you can spread your fugitive wings, and soar, and soar again.

In the desert, you see, there is everything and nothing... It is God without men.
- Honoré de Balzac, Une passion dans le désert, 1830(less)

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Aug 28, 2012 George Ilsley rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, autism

With a cover blurb from David Mitchell, it is not surprising that this novel first evokes The Cloud Atlas. However, this novel skips back and forth and around and it can be hard to keep characters in mind. This book also posed a challenge to the marketing department. It is most often described as being about an autistic boy lost in the desert, and yes, this does happen. On page 190. Obviously the novel is about much more than that, and I suspect the marketing department was scared of mentioning...more

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Apr 16, 2012 Sofia rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: n-america, literary

The best novel I read in a long time and I doubt it'll be topped by anything else this year. I can't believe this book didn't get more attention. I mean, if you like Jennifer Egan and/or David Mitchell you should not miss this.
Kunzru does the whole novel of ideas across time and continents thing as Mitchell and his writing has the same refinement if you know what I mean. He also reminds me of Egan with his talent for writing multiple characters in unique and pitch-perfect voices. He steers away...more

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Apr 22, 2013 Leah rated it 5 of 5 stars

‘More things in Heaven and Earth…’

Beautifully written, this novel takes us on a journey through time, where we meet a diverse cast of characters all of whose lives are affected in some way by the location in which they find themselves, the empty and mysterious Californian desert.

Each of the various tales is lovingly told and our sympathy is demanded for, and easily given to, each of the characters: from the original Native American inhabitants, to the Spanish missionary trying to bring Christia...more ‘More things in Heaven and Earth…’

Beautifully written, this novel takes us on a journey through time, where we meet a diverse cast of characters all of whose lives are affected in some way by the location in which they find themselves, the empty and mysterious Californian desert.

Each of the various tales is lovingly told and our sympathy is demanded for, and easily given to, each of the characters: from the original Native American inhabitants, to the Spanish missionary trying to bring Christianity to the ‘New World’, to the new-age followers of the UFO cult of the Ashtar Galactic Command, right up to the lost and lonely rock star of today. And our main sympathies lie with the present-day young couple, Jaz and Lisa, whose autistic son, Raj, mysteriously disappears during a trip to the desert - a disappearance that echoes earlier incidents in the history of this strange place. Through these interlinked stories, we are led into a maze of cultural heritage, belief systems and superstitions.

I think this is a book that may mean different things to different readers. For me, it was about the search for faith – the desire for belief. The characters bring so many gods to the desert over the years, and it seems that the desert absorbs them and weaves them into its mystery. Each of the characters is fundamentally changed by their experiences in this place – their existing beliefs shaken by what happens to them there. But the book is not preaching a particular line – the overwhelming feeling left at the end is that, for the author as well as for some of the characters, the question of whether there is something beyond the rational remains unanswered, perhaps unanswerable.

This may make the book sound like a heavy read, but the wonderful prose, the fascinating tales, the occasional flashes of humour and, above all, the sympathetic characters all combine to make this a book to be both savoured and enjoyed.

NB This book was provided for review by Amazon Vine UK.(less)

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Apr 06, 2013 Bonnie Brody rated it 5 of 5 stars

Gods Without Men tells about the mystery of the high desert in what is now San Bernardino County, California. Hari Kuzru is a masterful storyteller, weaving legend, Native American culture, hippie life and the disappearance of an autistic child into a compelling weave of interlocking narratives with the power of myth.

The novel features a fantastic cast of characters who run through time from the late 1700's to 2009. What holds them all together is their connection to the mysteries of the high de...more

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Feb 14, 2013 Kat rated it 3 of 5 stars

This book is reminiscent of Cloud Atlas, as many reviewers point out. Here the fragments from history are bound by a place rather than a birthmark and possible genetic thread. Also reminded me of the Peter Weir film Picnic at Hanging Rock: a mysterious disappearance by a rock... But here the person reappears. The only thread I was really following closely is Lisa and Jaz's whose son Raj does the disappearing/reappearing trick. The others seemed overwrought, though there was some fine writing to...more

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Feb 07, 2013 Gabriel C. rated it 4 of 5 stars

The blurb on the front of the book is by David Mitchell and one of the characters name-checks Gaiman. I'm going to say that this book is a happy average of Cloud Atlas and the Anansi Boys/American Gods stuff. It has the rhyme (Mitchell says "echo") of related and connected events repeating, but the connections are both more direct, more accessible, than those in Cloud Atlas, and at the same time more surprising because the narrative does not follow a strict step pyramid. This is no Alphabetical ...more The blurb on the front of the book is by David Mitchell and one of the characters name-checks Gaiman. I'm going to say that this book is a happy average of Cloud Atlas and the Anansi Boys/American Gods stuff. It has the rhyme (Mitchell says "echo") of related and connected events repeating, but the connections are both more direct, more accessible, than those in Cloud Atlas, and at the same time more surprising because the narrative does not follow a strict step pyramid. This is no Alphabetical Africa.

On the other hand, two of Gaiman's faults are his tendency to overexplain and a need to wrap things up nicely by the end. It's not so much that Kunzuru resists these tendencies as it is that he doesn't even seem to have them. The details of the mysteries are not to be spoken of, really, except in the repetition of the Coyote motif.

One thing I don't like, and this seems to be intentional, is how much of the characters are defined by hate. From the historically appropriate paternalism and mob mentality toward the native peoples to the incongruous murderous racism of Nephi Parr, from Jaz' latent antisemitism and homophobia to Lisa and her mother's anti-immigrant sentiments, from Schmidt's misogyny and misanthropy to the small-town paranoia of the locals, no matter the era, it seems like just about every character is defined by her or his outgrouping and hatred. I don't mind some of this, but come on. Can't we get a break? Maybe if Nicky's part had been scattered throughout to a slightly greater extent.

And I'm a bit confused about some of the peripheral characters, not about their existence but about their inclusion as narrative perspectives, about Nicky and Laila. It almost seems indulgent.

But these are quibbles. This book is like a well-made sandwich, not a slick fast-food thing, but real food, thicker in parts, thinner in parts, crunchy here, the unexpected pop of pepperoncini there, the taste of the bread suffusing everything, just a little, "subtile," the other tastes, here melding together, here coming apart into tone and overtone, into guitar and bass and drum.

I was listening to Comfortably Numb as I tried to go to sleep on the train, and I laughed out loud at the coincidences of imagery. Deafness, two balloons, the human as receptor, "the child is gone," the needle, a distant ship, I don't know. Goofy, I know. But people use strange plotting devices, nu?(less)

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Jan 03, 2013 Jack Rochester rated it 4 of 5 stars

This book started of deliciously. I voraciously enjoyed the author's writing style as it shifted from character to character, events past and present, in the early chapters, and how these people and historical occurrences wended their way along, building the story. I have the sense this was not a particularly easy novel to write, and perhaps needed to go through another deep revision to get it where it needed to be in the end. As it was, I felt the story sag under the weight of the author's inte...more

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Nov 17, 2012 Kkraemer rated it 4 of 5 stars

Balzac is quoted at the beginning of this book, saying (roughly) that the desert is God without men, and the various stories in this book show the tremendous power of the desert, of desertion, and of deserting one's life. Some wander, deserted by humanity; others are deserted by logic or love or understanding. For all, the desert is a profoundly odd experience, and they feel disconnected somehow, deserted by what they once held to be true.

I don't want to tell any of the stories, since reading th...more

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Oct 31, 2012 Brenda Ayala rated it 1 of 5 stars

I frankly don't see what the big deal is about this book. I understand the concept Kunzru was saying. I really do. But I hated this book. I finished it and all I could think was I wasted my time. Frankly, I didn't care about any of the characters. His style was stupid. He introduced us to huge amounts of characters, gave them elaborate backstories that explained how they got to wherever they were, then never mentions them again. What's the point? I now know about Dawn, the woman who joined a cou...more

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Jul 17, 2012 Jane rated it 3 of 5 stars

Different people, different lives, different eras all in the desert around the Pinnacle rocks.
All searching for something; a person, personal mystery, higher consciousness and beings ...The people and storys show a bizarre world with a connectibility you can almost catch hold of but never quite pin down.

Kunzru creates tangible characters with their own weird pasts and ideas.There were characters that you got angry with, like, disliked, pitied. The eras and characters are both well researched. I...more

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May 19, 2012 Katie rated it 4 of 5 stars

I had to laugh at myself, because after I started reading this book I thought the author's name sounded familiar, so I looked up what I've read in the past, and turns out I've read 2 books by him and didn't like either one. And yet here I am, reading a third, because he's one of those authors that book critics feel compelled to fawn over--a "big," intellectual author that you'd better say good things about or else you might look like an idiot later for dissing a masterpiece. I fell for it again....more

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Apr 18, 2012 Ms.pegasus rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: anyone seriously exploring our relationship to death; fans of "The Changeling" by Kenzaburo

Shelves: fiction, the-american-west

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. From Kunzru's imagination springs an octet of characters each viewing a fragment of their intertwined history. It is a history that spans the savagery of World War II ended by the atomic bomb, extra-terrestrial contact speculation like Roswell (1947), millenarian cults like Jim Jones' People's Temple, New Age counter-culture, and the rise of quant theory on Wall Street. The characters are not introduced chronologically; their life stories are told in fragments from each character's point of view...more From Kunzru's imagination springs an octet of characters each viewing a fragment of their intertwined history. It is a history that spans the savagery of World War II ended by the atomic bomb, extra-terrestrial contact speculation like Roswell (1947), millenarian cults like Jim Jones' People's Temple, New Age counter-culture, and the rise of quant theory on Wall Street. The characters are not introduced chronologically; their life stories are told in fragments from each character's point of view. Occasionally, the same incident is described from the memory of different people. For example, Jaz and his wife Lisa each recall the day of a fateful quarrel when Lisa drives off alone leaving Jaz with their son Raj. The fact that so many of the events are recalled from memory as well as the restricted viewpoints make these narrators particularly unreliable. The reader is left to speculate where the reality lies.

A further ambiguity is the fact that several key characters, Clark Davis, Coyote (the person), and Judy, are seen only through the eyes of others. Their inner motives are permanently hidden.

There is a particular element of surprise that the reader is intended to feel on first encountering this book. It is meant to be re-read, to test and reassess our own memory of the experience. Therefore, this is where I will issue my **SPOILER ALERT**. It is impossible to discuss GODS WITHOUT MEN without one.

To begin with, curious bits of Native American folklore are interspersed in the book. They suggest an underlying authorial plan to the reader's subconscious. The character in these tales is Coyote. He is insatiably curious, clever, impulsive, independent, and amoral. Life and death are two connected spaces, and in his many explorations, he passes in and out of these spaces. The book begins with a humorous reconstructed tale of Coyote as meth cook. Read that story again after finishing the book, and you will have a different experience of it. The second key myth is authentic. It describes how Coyote seeks to bring back his friends from the Land of the Dead.

Invoking these myths activates dormant feelings that cause metaphor and reality to merge. From that location, the skeptical reader is led to engage with the fantasies of these characters. What did happen in the desert? What does the cyclic repetition of destruction signify? The desert itself becomes a character, an unmoved impersonal presence: “...with all the stars smeared across the sky. The ground was breathing. That was odd. The whole desert was slowly inhaling and exhaling...” Of course the speaker here is a drugged up Nicky, so is he intuiting a truth or hallucinating?

The character I felt closest to was Jaz. His family life is told with genuine touches of wry humor. His conflicts with his tradition-bound parents, exacerbated by the birth of an autistic son and the disintegration of his marriage feel as raw as open wounds. Even though we know where this is leading, we still feel admiration for his mathematical skills that lead him to a successful career on Wall Street. It therefore feels discordant to see his reaction even after Raj is recovered. He intuits what we've been led to believe is the Truth. Yet, that intuition seems to be destroying him. That is the core of my ambivalent feelings. The book ends with a question. The reader feels impelled to ask the author: What did you mean? Instead of answering, the author seems to be asking us: What do you want it to mean? (less)

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Apr 18, 2012 Jennifer rated it 5 of 5 stars

I loved every last crazy component in this one - the hippie cult making drone music to contact aliens, the old Indian legends that may or may not have come to life, the British rock star trying to get the Laurel Canyon thing, the NY family caught between cultures and stock market crashes, the droll parody of an American military base with an Iraqi girl having to play a fictionalized version of her old life ... every story could've been a full novel on its own, but together they create a time-tri...more

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Mar 29, 2012 Michele Weiner rated it 4 of 5 stars

The Pinnacle is a three-pronged rock formation that rises from the floor of the Mohave Desert, and that attracts people who are searching for solace from God or the universe. This book tells the stories of the seekers in non-chronological order, jumping back and forth between the decades as generation after generation of humans attempt to find something they need from the rocks. The earliest story involves a Spanish priest exploring the land for the first time and converting the Indian tribes. T...more

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Mar 25, 2012 Michael rated it 5 of 5 stars

This is a knock out of a book because he captured the main character of the book, the Mojave Desert in all its contradictions of desolation and consolation, fullness and barrenness, luxuriousness and starkness. It's a novel about misfits attracted to a mystical, hardscrabble place with a power all its own. I can think of only of Cormac McCarthy and Edward Abbey who also have managed to capture the desert in its brilliant extremes. Having grown up within spitting distance of the locale, Twentynin...more

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Mar 18, 2012 Danny rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: library-book

In the Mojave desert there's a butte topped by three spires of rock called the Pinnacles. It's the sort of place that has a power all its own, and the characters in this novel find themselves drawn there. Skipping through time, from Spanish missionaries in 1778 to a burned out British rock star 2009, Hari Kunzru's novel weaves together the people whose lives are affected by the desert formation. Is it the trickster god Coyote trying to come out on top, or aliens communicating with hippies in geo...more

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Mar 17, 2012 Tony rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction-mainstream

GODS WITHOUT MEN. (2012). Hari Kunzru. ***.
This is not a novel in the normal sense of the word. The central character is really a rock formation in the desert around which the author weaves a set of stories that jump back and forth through time. He manages to cover themes from early American Indian history, to Spanish occupation, up to the present time in a hopscotch manner that left me confused as to what the story was really about. The most coherent part of the book was the exploration of the...more

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Mar 08, 2012 Judy rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 21st-century-fiction

What could a UFO hippie cult, a British rock star, a Spanish Franciscan priest, the son of a Sikh and his autistic son have in common? The Mohave Desert, for one thing. A search for meaning that connects the earthbound physical plane with the spiritual, for another. In his fourth novel, Hari Kunzru confronts head on the quandries of modern life while walking a fine line between irony and emotion, between serious and lighthearted, without missing a step.

He opens with a piece of flash fiction invo...more

What could a UFO hippie cult, a British rock star, a Spanish Franciscan priest, the son of a Sikh and his autistic son have in common? The Mohave Desert, for one thing. A search for meaning that connects the earthbound physical plane with the spiritual, for another. In his fourth novel, Hari Kunzru confronts head on the quandries of modern life while walking a fine line between irony and emotion, between serious and lighthearted, without missing a step.

He opens with a piece of flash fiction involving Coyote, Trickster of the World, attempting to make crystal meth. With a little help from his friends Cottontail Rabbit, Gila Monster, and Southern Fox, Coyote succeeds. The author succeeds in purveying a recipe for meth right there in his novel. Dangerous!

Jumping frenetically around in time with incidents from 1947 to 2008 to 1778 to 1958 to 1969 to 1920 and so on, Kunzru reveals the power of a god-like force, emanating from a rock formation called The Pinnacles, to a variety of characters. These people share the quality of standing to one degree or another outside what would be thought of as normal or mainstream.

When any author goes after the big ideas he or she has to anchor the story somewhere. Kunzru anchors his by means of these characters. Jaz Matharu, a math whiz, successful beyond his wildest dreams in terms of income and marriage, carries with him the fatal flaw of personal uncertainty and the Achilles heel of his origins. An American born son of Sikh immigrants, Jaz married Lisa, a stunning beauty of white American liberal sentiments and together they produced the autistic Raj. By the age of four, the child has ruined the idyllic love and life of this New York City couple, driving a deep wedge between their cultural differences.

The cult members, the rock star, the priest and other characters frame the story. The desert itself serves as another anchor. Even readers who have never experienced the searing desolate miles of the Southwestern American desert will feel its eerie power and sense the unease found there.

While on vacation in the Mojave, Jaz and his wife intersect with the history and characters already introduced in the story. When little Raj disappears in the midst of his parents' marital meltdown, the power and disquiet of the location become the forces that will be either the destruction or the salvation of their family. I found it fitting that Kunzru left me wondering whether destruction or salvation was the result of these forces in the final chapter.

This is not a nice, good family saga about people working out their issues. Nor is it a neatly wrapped up story with a hopeful ending. It is as full of strange goings on as is daily life in the 21st century. Along with a large dose of entertainment, Kunzru made me look around and wonder through a different lens than I usually employ.(less)

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Oct 30, 2011 Oliver rated it 5 of 5 stars

Disclaimer: Hari is a friend.

This doesn't have the exceptional formal control that My Revolutions did, but it is a terrific novel. Inhuman and human simultaneously, trapped in a history that it also denies.
One of its aims, I think, is to leave us like Benjamin's "Angel of History"
Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has...more

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May 30, 2012 Tuck rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

an incredible novel of modern times usa. a filthy rich physicist slash wall street trader and his writerly stay at home wife and their autistic boy take a trip to mojave desert to sort their shit out because family is disintegrating. they end up in what turns out to be a power center of the universe (who knew?) where novel bops back and forth from 1950's cult leader building a communications device to talk with all the helpful aliens who want to tell us earthlings how to live and 1500's spanish...more

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Jan 03, 2013 Maureen rated it 3 of 5 stars

Advertised as a modern novel, if modern means disjointed, it's apt. I did like the unifying theme of the setting - the trinity of Pinnacle rocks in the southern California desert somewhere near Twenty Nine Palms. The other theme that attempts to bring it together is the search for meaning in life - be it through aliens, the Christian church, drugs, communing with nature, Yahweh... This one is too broad, especially when he extends it back four centuries and to the other side of the world on Iraq'...more

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Jul 28, 2012 Marxist Monkey rated it 5 of 5 stars

It might be too strong to call this a masterpiece. Yes, that would be too strong. It might be that my experience of this book has been too strongly effected by my own mild experience of alienation and exile over the past four months. It might be that the accident of my having just read Murakami and Eugenides and Riley has led me to exactly the place where this book could hit as hard as it did.

What is it about? The longing for meaning. The anxiety of parenting. The illusion of meaning and the ill...more

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Apr 09, 2013 Vivienne rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: audiobook, reading-group-selection, aliens-ufos, native-american, new-age, suspence, contemporary, period-fiction

It's only a short while since I read this in print format but I managed to get it selected for one of my reading groups and given how much I enjoyed it the first time, I thought it best to approach it in another medium before the meeting.

The audiobook used multiple narrators that gave a sense of the different sections over time. A second encounter with the novel made me change the rating from 4 to 5-star. I found the UFO aspects as well as the Native American culture came to the fore along with...more

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Feb 27, 2013 Mkeirsbi rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: r-52-books

I'm thoroughly impressed by this novel! And it's not easy to write a review for a novel with this scope. Opposed to normal stories where the narrative is built around a character, the main character of this book is in fact the desert somewhere between Las Vegas and Arizona.

The Pinnacles, the main region the novel takes place in, is a place people usually don't visit. They just end up there. Be it a washed out rock star, a runaway teenager, a cult or a family with an autistic son trying to go on...more I'm thoroughly impressed by this novel! And it's not easy to write a review for a novel with this scope. Opposed to normal stories where the narrative is built around a character, the main character of this book is in fact the desert somewhere between Las Vegas and Arizona.

The Pinnacles, the main region the novel takes place in, is a place people usually don't visit. They just end up there. Be it a washed out rock star, a runaway teenager, a cult or a family with an autistic son trying to go on a holiday: the people arrive in the Pinnacles more by accident than by choice. The novel takes us back and forth through time, and shows us how and why the people ended up there.

All stories echo through the other stories, and several stories/characters start bleeding over in each other's stories. There are some stories that are pushed more into the foreground, so it's easy to see the novel as the story of Dawn, a runaway teenager with spiritual tendencies that made her home in the desert, and the story of a jewish-indian family that are under a lot of stress because their son is autistic. The tension even mounts when they lose their son on a family outing. Several months of insecurity about who might have abducted the boy, or whether or not he's alive ensue.

These foregrounded story lines really jump off the pages. They are cleverly written, and manage to keep your interest throughout the novel. A small point of criticism I have to make is that the secondary stories are far less engaging. I understand why they're there, and they do add to the layering of the novel. In brief: those chapters are necessary to tell the story Kunzru wanted to tell. Ultimately, in light of the totality of the novel, these intersected stories have too little weight to really engage the reader. They are by no means casual intersections, but lack the depth the other story lines have. So I have to admit these chapters were far less appealing. I was very glad when I ended the chapters in between the major story lines, so I could fully engage with the story again.

However, I must admit this is more a problem of my own, and not so much a problem of the novel. I just might be too much of an impatient reader to focus on the sidetracks once I figure out the structure of a novel.

I can't fault the novel for not focusing solely on the major story lines, because that's actually not what the story's about. The novel ultimately tells the tale of the Pinnacles. It shows us, through a variety of stories, what the desert does to people: it's a safe haven for people that are lost; it's a projection for people's fear and desires. Even though there's nothing there, people attribute all sorts of stories to it. The vast nothingness makes people hold on to things that aren't real or aren't really there. I don't want to state it makes people crazy, because it's more nuanced than that. The desert can be seen as a metaphor for the horror Blaise Pascal tried to denote: how do you give form to the void, the emptiness, the nothingness of our existence?
The novel doesn't provide answers. It doesn't even pose questions. It just shows us how the desert brings people to different mechanisms to cope. Whether it's the group-dynamics of a cult, the belief in aliens, drugs, religion, conspiracy theories, or ultimately... death.

An impressive read indeed. The blurb states it's an echo chamber of a novel. I can't dispute that. This novel will echo with me for a long time to come. (less)

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About Hari Kunzru

Hari Mohan Nath Kunzru (born 1969) is a British novelist and journalist, author of the novels The Impressionist, Transmission and My Revolutions. Of mixed English and Kashmiri Pandit ancestry, he grew up in Essex. He studied English at Wadham College, Oxford University, then gained an MA in Philosophy and Literature from Warwick University. His work has been translated into twenty languages. He li...more

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Quotes from Gods Without Men

“What if one were to want to hunt for these hidden presences? You can’t just rummage around like you’re at a yard sale. You have to listen. You have to pay attention. There are certain things you can’t look at directly. You need to trick them into revealing themselves. That’s what we’re doing with Walter, Jaz. We’re juxtaposing things, listening for echoes. It’s not some silly cybernetic dream of command and control, modeling the whole world so you can predict the outcome. It’s certainly not a theory of everything. I don’t have a theory of any kind. What I have is far more profound.’

‘What’s that?’

‘A sense of humor.’

Jaz looked at him, trying to find a clue in his gaunt face, in the clear gray eyes watching him with such - what? Amusement? Condescension? There was something about the man which brought on a sort of hermeneutic despair. He was a forest of signs.

‘We’re hunting for jokes.’ Bachman spoke slowly, as if to a child. ‘Parapraxes. Cosmic slips of the tongue. They’re the key to the locked door. They’ll help us discover it.’

‘Discover what?’

‘The face of God. What else would we be looking for?” — 2 people liked it

“Driving was almost the only thing that felt natural in America. It was traditional. It was patriotic. When you accelerated, you could almost hear the crowd cheering you on.” — 1 person liked it

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