American Gods (American Gods, #1) in The Alternative Worlds

Feb 07, 2012 mark monday rated it really liked it

Shelves: legendarium, secret-histories

a protagonist, Shadow. calm, collected, quiet, passive, cagey, a tough guy and a sensitive guy. his life has been about reacting and not impacting. he moves through his story as if through a dream; tragedies and betrayals and mysteries and confidence games, the beginnings and endings of hope and love and life - all viewed as if through water, as if these terrible wonders were happening to someone else. he could be nothing more than a pawn in life - let alone a pawn of the gods - but yet his pass a protagonist, Shadow. calm, collected, quiet, passive, cagey, a tough guy and a sensitive guy. his life has been about reacting and not impacting. he moves through his story as if through a dream; tragedies and betrayals and mysteries and confidence games, the beginnings and endings of hope and love and life - all viewed as if through water, as if these terrible wonders were happening to someone else. he could be nothing more than a pawn in life - let alone a pawn of the gods - but yet his passivity is combined with an inner strength, a gentle kindness, an innate decency. his decency is more than a trait - it defines him. and when he does decide to act, his actions become another one of this novel's terrible wonders. he is complex and completely appealing. one of my my favorite heroes in modern fiction.

a wife, Laura. dead before the novel begins. a living ghost, a revenant; aided by a magical coin. a sad and appalling and dreamlike journey. a terrific payoff.

a Road Trip, full of kitchen-sink reality, full of terrible wonder.

an old guard, the Old Gods. Odin, Anansi, Czernobog, Anubis and Thoth and Bast and Horus, Eostre, Kali, the Norns. the Queen of Sheba - strangely, now an Old God. their transformation into prosaic american emigres - confidence men and tenement dwellers and whores and jailhouse cellmates - is both a fun game of mystery-solving (guess the god!) and a rather sad parallel to how the world of the not-aged pushes the aged into their little corners, out of sight and out of mind, into a world of irrelevance. and yet the old gods are not portrayed with cloying sweetness - there is no filter of nostalgia or hints of some long-lost, longed-for Olden Way to make us love them. they are fascinating, powerful, often monstrous, entirely without easy sentiment.

a new guard, the New Gods. Technology, the Media, the Vehicle, the Men in Black. it's easy to put them all automatically in a nice little box labeled The Villains. but that's too simple; too instantly gratifying. the novel's portrait of these potentially repellent figures is one painted in broad strokes, lacking subtlety - but it is also a fair one... they sound and act like villains, and yet they are not. how can they be? we worship them on a daily basis. they are only evil if we consider our modern age an evil one.

a creepy subsidiary villain: a Kobold. he lives in a portrait of classic americana that miraculously manages to be free of condescension.

a Confidence Game, long-game style, played by two gods, with our hero as their catspaw. cleverly done by the gods. beautifully overturned by our hero. brilliantly pulled off by the author.

an author, Neil Gaiman. i'll admit that i have well-stocked reserves of love for the man, ready and willing to be accessed. his Sandman series is my favorite comic book, full of crazy imagination and complex mysteries and creepy villains and complicated heroes and terrible, wonderful journeys. so i was prepared to love this book as i love its author, to draw upon that deep well of affection. there were connecting factors that helped to ease my transition from dealing with my old god of awesome comics to this new literary god of popular fantasy fiction; namely his interest in unearthing and revitalizing the world's myths and legends - an ongoing Gaiman leitmotif. i was less prepared to discover that Gaiman is an actual writer! his prose is fluid, nuanced, supple, at ease with both constant ambiguity and you-are-there, detailed realism. both grounded and hallucinatory. the narrative is anchored by everyday reality as well as a strange lack of affect - a blankness of tone that is a good fit for a phantasmagorical road trip. and then it is capable of sudden, surreal flights of visionary madness, a grey-toned package that becomes a conjurer's box of magic. and then that tricksy legerdemain can just as quickly transform back into a soulful and emotionally honest portrait of one man's journey through various adventures, through his own life, to the end of it and back again. who could ask for more?

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Aug 03, 2017 Nicky rated it really liked it

Shelves: fantasy, based-on-myth-saga-etc

I know that there’s probably a ton of “problematic” themes/scenes/descriptions in this book; without paying much attention to the specifics, I’ve still gained the impression that Gaiman isn’t exactly beloved of the social justice crowd, for various reasons. And I can definitely understand the criticisms of some of his actions, statements, aspects of his writing… but American Gods is still a really satisfying, solid read, and I enjoyed it. I found some of the mythology a little too obvious this t ...more

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Jul 06, 2011 bsc rated it it was ok

Shelves: fiction, fantasy, read-2011

I got talked into reading another Gaiman book and yet again it felt like a waste of time. I guess this will be my last. Too bad, because I like the man quite a bit.

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Nov 16, 2012 Dan Harris rated it it was amazing

I've been meaning to read American Gods for about five years now, but didn't get around to picking up a copy until a few weeks ago, when I was browsing in a large bookstore near my apartment and found a copy for only R$22! (I live in Brazil. That's about $11. English language novels are normally about four times that price.)

Needless to say I bought it and hurried home. I'd just finished reading the final Dark Tower - well, Book VII, not the most recent novel that falls in the middle of the serie ...more

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