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A Simple Carpenter
A carpenter is shipwrecked on a small Mediterranean island--he's completely lost his memory but has acquired the ability to speak, write and understand all languages. After his rescue, he spends time recuperating with a group of nuns who, observing him perform what appear to be small miracles, take him to be the second coming of Jesus Christ. Later, in Beirut, he's hired as a translator for the UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon, and is recruited as a messenger for Black September, a Palestinian terrorist group. Disillusioned by this experience, he treks on foot across the Galilean hills to the Sea of Galilee, encountering a series of strange communities evoking biblical times along the way. Part biblical fable, part magic realism, part thriller, Carpenter is set in the Middle Eastern "Holy Land" in the early '80s, against the backdrop of the civil war in neighboring Lebanon.
278 pages, Paperback
Published May 14, 2024
15 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
May 27, 2024
A Simple Carpenter is a very well written book that is part biblical fiction, magic realm and a bit of thriller all mixed in. Dave Margoshes did a fantastic job in balancing these three genres to create an enjoyable story.
I always have this fascination with books about God and this book asked all the right questions and gave some good responses with them. The overall story is our main character wakes up one day on a boat and has no recollection of any of his memories. He is a blank state and we follow him as he tries to regain the memory he's lost. As the story progresses, the main character discovers he has an uncanny ability to understand any language spoken to him. Pair this with his ability to perform small miracles, people start seeing him as a second coming of Jesus Christ. Of course, our main character doesn't see it that way which leads to his inquiry about God.
With addition to this, the characters and the settings did an amazing job in drawing the readers in. The characters introduced are a little odd but it fit in so well with this magical realm created that I wanted to read more.
I loved the ending and in a way I thought it wrapped up the book really nicely. I'm trying to not spoil it so I won't mention it but if you end up picking up A Simple Carpenter a read, please message me because I have discussion points 😂
The only thing that caused me to drop a star was I found some parts repetitive and I was impatient because I wanted to know what happens next.
To me, it was an interesting read and I wished more people will pick this up. The ending left me googling for more discussion on A Simple Carpenter and I love when a book gets me wanting more.
I always have this fascination with books about God and this book asked all the right questions and gave some good responses with them. The overall story is our main character wakes up one day on a boat and has no recollection of any of his memories. He is a blank state and we follow him as he tries to regain the memory he's lost. As the story progresses, the main character discovers he has an uncanny ability to understand any language spoken to him. Pair this with his ability to perform small miracles, people start seeing him as a second coming of Jesus Christ. Of course, our main character doesn't see it that way which leads to his inquiry about God.
With addition to this, the characters and the settings did an amazing job in drawing the readers in. The characters introduced are a little odd but it fit in so well with this magical realm created that I wanted to read more.
I loved the ending and in a way I thought it wrapped up the book really nicely. I'm trying to not spoil it so I won't mention it but if you end up picking up A Simple Carpenter a read, please message me because I have discussion points 😂
The only thing that caused me to drop a star was I found some parts repetitive and I was impatient because I wanted to know what happens next.
To me, it was an interesting read and I wished more people will pick this up. The ending left me googling for more discussion on A Simple Carpenter and I love when a book gets me wanting more.
December 26, 2024
A shipwrecked carpenter with no memories turns up in the Middle East in the 1980s. Master of languages, inconsistently reliable narrator, locus of small miracles. Could he be *that* carpenter? Maybe the black bird following him knows. Dave Margoshes’ novel A Simple Carpenter is a captivating, timely, intermittently surreal odyssey tale of identity and loss and decisions and regret.
April 13, 2025
“A Simple Carpenter,” by Dave Margoshes sunk me into a narrative hinting of a hero’s journey grounded in a realist setting and timeline. The story centers around a carpenter who succumbs with the crew on a ship to an invasive insect attack that leaves many perishing when they visit a remote island. Upon recovering, the carpenter finds that he has lost all memory of who he is and where he came from. Compellingly, despite his loss of identity, the carpenter finds himself able to understand a multitude of languages that will serve him throughout the novel. He is shipwrecked with his crew and finds himself the sole survivor clinging to life on a raft. When the raft is taken from him, he is washed ashore on an island, alone, except for a mythical creature who begins to visit him and convey knowledge, direction of being, almost a testing who will come to exist as a spiritual checkpoint and guide throughout his journey.
The carpenter recuperates next with a group of nuns who come to see the miracles that unfurl in his presence as divine. The carpenter had kept a journal of his time on the island and his encounter with the beast. The head nun takes this journal and sends it to Rome to be translated. The return of the original journal and the translation confirm their beliefs. In reading the journal he had kept on the island and mention of the supernatural beast; the nuns revere the carpenter as the next coming of Christ. When the carpenter is given access to the translated journal later on in the novel, he sees the manipulation and turning of his words to support a polemic of a second coming narrative. He leaves the nuns, maintaining his humility and rejecting all godly classifications and returns to a job he had taken as a translator for the UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon. Allowing himself to become embroiled between a Palestinian terrorist group and Jewish fronts, the carpenter abandons his post.
There is much moving on and letting go in this novel as the carpenter encounters strange and almost unbelievable groups of people, like a fable, “A Simple Carpenter,” braids together biblical fiction, magic realism and thriller plot components. I read through wanting to know the one hanging element of the novel for me, would he recover his memory and know who he is? This suspense lead me to realize that knowing oneself is not always so straightforward, what I was seeking for was overlooking that the quest itself was more important.
Dave Margoshes is a poet and fiction writer from Saskatchewan where he has spent thirty-five years of his life. His writings have been published in literary magazines and anthologies. He has published twenty books, fiction, nonfiction and poetry and was a finalist for the Journey Prize and the ReLit Prize. His book, “Bix’s Trumpet and Other Stories,” won Saskatchewan Book of the Year in 2007, A Book of Great Worth and Amazon.ca’s top hundred books for 2012. Margoshes earned the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Saskatchewan Arts Board in 2022. He resides near Saskatoon.
“A Simple Carpenter” is a novel that will leave the reader in contemplation and want more from the ending in knowing what will unfold for the carpenter when the prose has ceased. That longing and turning of the reader into inquiry is reflective of a well-written story. Other reviewers have shared that they want discussion questions on the novel’s ending and seek connection with other readers. The purpose of the story is just that, to push the reader to contemplate, reflect and grapple with their own understanding of the sacred amongst the mundane.
The plotline plays on society’s reaction to religious interpretations and holy phenomena and what we seek from these layers to apply meaning in our own lives. The political dynamics engaged with in this novel are timely and could offend, and that is the point. The manuscript was finished before Oct 7, 2023, making the immersion of this text into the world all the more poignant, unintentionally. How would different pockets of the world comprehend the sublime and divine? Would we identify if our own meanings are projected back on to the narrative? How much do we influence the story? How much does the story affect us?
Thank you to Dave Margoshes, Radiant Press and River Street Writing for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review!
https://www.sarahailstone.com/book-re...
The carpenter recuperates next with a group of nuns who come to see the miracles that unfurl in his presence as divine. The carpenter had kept a journal of his time on the island and his encounter with the beast. The head nun takes this journal and sends it to Rome to be translated. The return of the original journal and the translation confirm their beliefs. In reading the journal he had kept on the island and mention of the supernatural beast; the nuns revere the carpenter as the next coming of Christ. When the carpenter is given access to the translated journal later on in the novel, he sees the manipulation and turning of his words to support a polemic of a second coming narrative. He leaves the nuns, maintaining his humility and rejecting all godly classifications and returns to a job he had taken as a translator for the UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon. Allowing himself to become embroiled between a Palestinian terrorist group and Jewish fronts, the carpenter abandons his post.
There is much moving on and letting go in this novel as the carpenter encounters strange and almost unbelievable groups of people, like a fable, “A Simple Carpenter,” braids together biblical fiction, magic realism and thriller plot components. I read through wanting to know the one hanging element of the novel for me, would he recover his memory and know who he is? This suspense lead me to realize that knowing oneself is not always so straightforward, what I was seeking for was overlooking that the quest itself was more important.
Dave Margoshes is a poet and fiction writer from Saskatchewan where he has spent thirty-five years of his life. His writings have been published in literary magazines and anthologies. He has published twenty books, fiction, nonfiction and poetry and was a finalist for the Journey Prize and the ReLit Prize. His book, “Bix’s Trumpet and Other Stories,” won Saskatchewan Book of the Year in 2007, A Book of Great Worth and Amazon.ca’s top hundred books for 2012. Margoshes earned the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Saskatchewan Arts Board in 2022. He resides near Saskatoon.
“A Simple Carpenter” is a novel that will leave the reader in contemplation and want more from the ending in knowing what will unfold for the carpenter when the prose has ceased. That longing and turning of the reader into inquiry is reflective of a well-written story. Other reviewers have shared that they want discussion questions on the novel’s ending and seek connection with other readers. The purpose of the story is just that, to push the reader to contemplate, reflect and grapple with their own understanding of the sacred amongst the mundane.
The plotline plays on society’s reaction to religious interpretations and holy phenomena and what we seek from these layers to apply meaning in our own lives. The political dynamics engaged with in this novel are timely and could offend, and that is the point. The manuscript was finished before Oct 7, 2023, making the immersion of this text into the world all the more poignant, unintentionally. How would different pockets of the world comprehend the sublime and divine? Would we identify if our own meanings are projected back on to the narrative? How much do we influence the story? How much does the story affect us?
Thank you to Dave Margoshes, Radiant Press and River Street Writing for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review!
https://www.sarahailstone.com/book-re...
January 15, 2025
In this enormously entertaining and thought-provoking novel, Dave Margoshes tells the story of a man whose quest for his own identity places him at odds with a world that is constantly seeking to label him, often in ways that cause him great discomfort. At its heart, A Simple Carpenter is an adventure story, one with sizable ambitions and many surprising twists. As we begin, the shape-shifting narrator, who goes by several names in the book, is a crew member on a fishing boat in the Mediterranean Sea. Engine problems have set the boat adrift, and he is recovering from an illness that has wiped his memory clean and left him with no idea who he is or where he came from: he only knows he’s a carpenter because the first mate informs him of this while he’s bedridden with fever. Then a storm sinks the vessel, and the narrator ends up the last man alive stranded on a remote island. After his rescue from the island, the narrator awakens in a clinic run by nuns in a city on the Lebanese coast. Here, he is treated for malnutrition. Gradually he recovers his strength.
The world that Margoshes has conjured for the novel is a magical, fantastical version of our own world, one that is easily recognizable but which differs in significant ways from our own experience. For instance, on the island the narrator encounters a large shaggy haired “creature” that speaks to him with a human voice, offering advice and guidance. Initially alarming, the creature becomes for the narrator a comforting presence that appears to him from time to time throughout the story. And after recovering from the illness that took his memory, the narrator realizes he can understand everything being said by the crew members on the fishing boat, even though they are of various ethnicities and speak a dizzying array of languages. After leaving the clinic, the narrator toils at several odd jobs, but when his facility with languages is noticed by a member of a local United Nations peacekeeping office, he’s hired as a translator. This work brings him into contact with people on both sides of the conflict raging in the region, Arabs and Israelis, some of whom are sincerely seeking peace, others whose agendas are less clear. Then, while still with the UN, he is recruited as a messenger for a shadowy Palestinian collective whose coded communications make no sense to him but, as time goes by, carry increasingly sinister undertones. Later, disillusioned by a peacekeeping role that no longer gives him hope, and regretting his decision to ally himself with the Palestinians, whose behaviour has become threatening, he travels to Israel in search of personal serenity and chasing the possibility that clues to his own origins are there to be found. In equal measures enthralling and puzzling, A Simple Carpenter is a novel that leaves conclusions up to the reader, conclusions that will depend in large part upon what the reader brings to the act of reading it. It is a book written with restraint and great respect for the ineffable nature of religious experience. But it is also a compulsively readable page-turner, a novel that, while gleefully defying convention on almost every page, is artfully constructed and endlessly inventive. The reader will notice as well that the story it tells is one of great relevance to our troubled and troubling modern world.
The world that Margoshes has conjured for the novel is a magical, fantastical version of our own world, one that is easily recognizable but which differs in significant ways from our own experience. For instance, on the island the narrator encounters a large shaggy haired “creature” that speaks to him with a human voice, offering advice and guidance. Initially alarming, the creature becomes for the narrator a comforting presence that appears to him from time to time throughout the story. And after recovering from the illness that took his memory, the narrator realizes he can understand everything being said by the crew members on the fishing boat, even though they are of various ethnicities and speak a dizzying array of languages. After leaving the clinic, the narrator toils at several odd jobs, but when his facility with languages is noticed by a member of a local United Nations peacekeeping office, he’s hired as a translator. This work brings him into contact with people on both sides of the conflict raging in the region, Arabs and Israelis, some of whom are sincerely seeking peace, others whose agendas are less clear. Then, while still with the UN, he is recruited as a messenger for a shadowy Palestinian collective whose coded communications make no sense to him but, as time goes by, carry increasingly sinister undertones. Later, disillusioned by a peacekeeping role that no longer gives him hope, and regretting his decision to ally himself with the Palestinians, whose behaviour has become threatening, he travels to Israel in search of personal serenity and chasing the possibility that clues to his own origins are there to be found. In equal measures enthralling and puzzling, A Simple Carpenter is a novel that leaves conclusions up to the reader, conclusions that will depend in large part upon what the reader brings to the act of reading it. It is a book written with restraint and great respect for the ineffable nature of religious experience. But it is also a compulsively readable page-turner, a novel that, while gleefully defying convention on almost every page, is artfully constructed and endlessly inventive. The reader will notice as well that the story it tells is one of great relevance to our troubled and troubling modern world.
May 20, 2024
Revived following a rescue at sea, the Carpenter has no memory at all and only a brief account to explain his recent trauma. As he searches for his identity and for meaning in a life where he is newly born, people call him many names. Those names may or may not offer clues to his origins.
Despite being set in the modern era, I found myself repeatedly drawn back to biblical times, sometimes due to symbolism, and other times through references to the culture and geography of the Middle East.
An engaging plot, relatable characters, and a touch of magical realism plus elements of a fable will surely make this book appeal to many readers.
Despite being set in the modern era, I found myself repeatedly drawn back to biblical times, sometimes due to symbolism, and other times through references to the culture and geography of the Middle East.
An engaging plot, relatable characters, and a touch of magical realism plus elements of a fable will surely make this book appeal to many readers.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews