Download The Kingdom Book PDF Download
Download The Kingdom Book PDF Download By Emmanuel Carrère. Emmanuel Carrère, a genre-defying author, revisits the story of the early Church in his latest work, which focuses on a Messiah whose blood we drink and his body we eat. Using Carrère’s “doors” into the Bible, readers are taken on an idiosyncratic and at times iconoclastic journey into the Church’s past. Upon his arrival, he joins the ragtag group of early Christians and follows them through the tumultuous days of the Christian faith’s inception.
A skilled storyteller, Carrère retells the New Testament’s climate using biblical scholarship like an HD camcorder, intertwining his own account of confronting the fundamental tenets of the Christian faith with those of the first Christians. St. Paul and Luke’s encounter with the marginal Jewish sect that eventually became Christianity, as well as Carrère’s investigation of its founder, an obscure religious freak who died under notorious circumstances, are depicted in Carrère’s novel.
Carrère sets out on a whirlwind chase through the Bible’s final chapters, tracing the paths of characters who believed they were caught up in the most significant events of their time. Kingdom chronicles the beginnings of religion and the ongoing struggle to find one’s place within it.
1. Download The Kingdom Book From AMAZON HERE
2. Download The Kingdom Book HERE
Review of The Kingdom Book By Emmanuel Carrère PDF
This is a fascinating sandwich of a book. By which I mean that there are slices of the author’s life and slices of his (well-informed) view of the lives of the evangelist Luke and the apostle Paul, as well as some other more minor characters in the drama of the origins of Christianity.
The first slice of autobiography is rather thick, about 75 pages, but we find that he went through an earlier period of intense Christian religiosity, followed by a gradual progression to agnosticism (which perhaps is the correct term—Carrère is not very specific about his current world view). Thus, he does not come at the book’s subject from ignorance, but from years of absorption in it. Later slices of autobiography describe what is going on in his life as he writes the book. Readers (including me) who are more interested in the subject of Christian origins than in the author’s life might become rather impatient with these parts of the sandwich, but Carrère uses them in an inventive way by playing his personal experiences of the characters of Luke and Paul in order to bring them more to life than we usually see them portrayed. He almost writes as though the screenwriter and director in him are producing a film in which he tags along with the two ancients, experiencing the Mediterranean world of the first century CE at first hand.
The publisher’s blurb calls the book “a sweeping fictional account of the early Christians,” but it is only fictional in the sense that Carrère fills the gaps in what the historical record tells us about his two characters and the world they lived in with some speculation. However, his surmises are quite credible to this reader, as are his considerable deviations from the conventional tellings of the “greatest story ever told” that one can still hear today from most persons of the cloth and even from many pedigreed scholars of Christian history. Those who are convinced of these widely-believed pieties may be shocked by the book, but it is one that any open-minded person will learn much from.
Editorial Reviews On The Kingdom Book
Reviews
“Carrère has managed to renovate the idea of what nonfiction writing can be. Profoundly intimate, historically and philosophically serious but able to cast compulsive narrative spells, Carrère’s books are hybrids, marrying deep reporting to scholarly explorations of theology, philosophy, psychology, personal history, and historiography . . . Carrère has managed to write one masterpiece after another . . . The need to understand the role you have in the larger human story is at the heart of this beautiful, difficult book. Difficult not in form but in feeling, The Kingdom manages to get at the contradictions of what we call intimacy.” ―Wyatt Mason, The New York Times Magazine
“An amazingly various book, [The Kingdom] narrates the author’s crises of religious faith in the nineteen-nineties; combines conventional history and speculative reconstruction to describe the rise of early Christianity; deftly animates the first-century lives and journeys of Paul, Luke, and John; and attempts to explain how an unlikely cult, formed around the death and resurrection of an ascetic lyrical revolutionary, grew into the established Church we know today . . . What makes The Kingdom so engrossing is this element of personal struggle, our sense that the agnostic author is looking over his shoulder at the armies of faith, as they pursue him to the wall of rationality.” ―James Wood, The New Yorker
“To open the pages of this book is to fall into a world of speculation, memoir, history, and belief and disbelief in untidy measures. . . . a masterwork that takes readers into the heart of Christianity’s first days, as well into the depths of the author’s psyche. . . . The only category it really belongs in is tour de force.” ―Ilene Cooper, Booklist (starred review) The Kingdom by Emmanuel Carrère PDF
“Memoir, fiction, and history combine in a stirring portrayal of the world of the first Christians . . . A passionate, digressive, empathetic history of religious rebels and the mystery of faith.” ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“The latest from Carrère (Limonov) is a tale of modern and ancient Christianity, filtered through a text that’s equal parts memoir, academic essay, and fictional exploration. . . . a frequently fascinating book written by a curious, sharp mind.” ― Publishers Weekly
“Emmanuel Carrère [is] one of the best known and most innovative French writers.” ―Rachel Donadio, The New York Times
“I left the Catholic Church at thirteen and have not spent much time thinking about religion since then. But Emmanuel Carrère’s The Kingdom kept me pinned to its pages until the end. It is personal and rigorous, skeptical and open, casual and profound, and its speculative portrait of Saint Luke, its main character, is as compelling as any fictional life I’ve read lately.” ― Luc Sante, author of The Other Paris
“My favorite books about Christianity are Augustine’s Confessions, Origen’s Contra Celsum, and, now, Emmanuel Carrère’s The Kingdom. Both a pocket history and a gripping (and surprising!) intellectual self-portrait, I know of nothing else quite like it ―and I wish like all hell I’d written it. Carrère is one of our planet’s most compelling, inimitable writers, and The Kingdom is, in my view, his greatest book yet.” ― Tom Bissell, author of Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve
About the Author The Kingdom Book Emmanuel Carrère
Emmanuel Carrère, born in Paris in 1957, is a writer, scriptwriter, and film producer. He is the award-winning, internationally renowned author of Limonov, The Mustache, Class Trip, The Adversary (a New York Times Notable Book), My Life as a Russian Novel, and Lives Other Than My Own, which was awarded the Globe de Cristal for Best Novel in 2010. For Limonov, Carrère received the Prix Renaudot and the Prix des Prix in 2011 and the Europese Literatuurprijs in 2013.
John Lambert has translated Monsieur, Reticence, and Self-Portrait Abroad by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, as well as Emmanuel Carrère’s Limonov. He lives in Nantes with his wife and three children.