Savage Gods

Paperback, 142 pages

Published Sept. 17, 2019 by Two Dollar Radio.

ISBN:
978-1-937512-85-9
Copied ISBN!

View on OpenLibrary

3 stars (3 reviews)

After moving with his wife and two children to a smallholding in Ireland, Paul Kingsnorth expects to find contentment. It is the goal he has sought ― to nest, to find home ― after years of rootlessness as an environmental activist and author. Instead he finds that his tools as a writer are failing him, calling into question his foundational beliefs about language and setting him at odds with culture itself.

Informed by his experiences with indigenous peoples, the writings of D.H. Lawrence and Annie Dillard, and the day-to-day travails of farming his own land, Savage Gods asks: what does it mean to belong? What sacrifices must be made in order to truly inhabit a life? And can words ever paint the truth of the world ― or are they part of the great lie which is killing it?

2 editions

Review of 'Savage Gods' on 'Storygraph'

3 stars

Writers are lost people. Nobody would write a book if they weren’t lost. Nobody would write a book if they were not in search of paradise, and nobody would be in search of paradise unless they believed it might exist somewhere, which means out there, which means just beyond my reach. Writers can see paradise, but can never touch it.



This is a parable of a book, a journey that's gradually told via Ireland, fables, gods, and family. I've not read Paul Kingsnorth before, but he strikes me as a quite elusive man in his mid-forties, used to writing, prone to recollect without nostalgia.

Perhaps the following lines say most about this book:

I am a writer. Writing has controlled me and now perhaps it has become me. Writing has been put, always, before everything else, because if you don’t pay obeisance to the god then the god will abandon …

Review of 'Savage Gods' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

Writers are lost people. Nobody would write a book if they weren’t lost. Nobody would write a book if they were not in search of paradise, and nobody would be in search of paradise unless they believed it might exist somewhere, which means out there, which means just beyond my reach. Writers can see paradise, but can never touch it.

This is a parable of a book, a journey that's gradually told via Ireland, fables, gods, and family. I've not read Paul Kingsnorth before, but he strikes me as a quite elusive man in his mid-forties, used to writing, prone to recollect without nostalgia.Perhaps the following lines say most about this book:





I am a writer. Writing has controlled me and now perhaps it has become me. Writing has been put, always, before everything else, because if you don’t pay obeisance to the god then the god will abandon you. …