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| The Gargoyle | 
 enlarge | Author: Andrew Davidson
Publisher: Doubleday
Category: Book
List Price: $25.95
Buy New: $8.75
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Avg. Customer Rating:  143 reviews
Sales Rank: 2848
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 480
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.8
Dimensions (in): 9.5 x 6.6 x 1.2
ISBN: 0385524943
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN: 9780385524940
ASIN: 0385524943
Publication Date: August 5, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
Product Description
An extraordinary debut novel of love that survives the fires of hell and transcends the boundaries of time.
The narrator of The Gargoyle is a very contemporary cynic, physically beautiful and sexually adept, who dwells in the moral vacuum that is modern life. As the book opens, he is driving along a dark road when he is distracted by what seems to be a flight of arrows. He crashes into a ravine and suffers horrible burns over much of his body. As he recovers in a burn ward, undergoing the tortures of the damned, he awaits the day when he can leave the hospital and commit carefully planned suicide?for he is now a monster in appearance as well as in soul.
A beautiful and compelling, but clearly unhinged, sculptress of gargoyles by the name of Marianne Engel appears at the foot of his bed and insists that they were once lovers in medieval Germany. In her telling, he was a badly injured mercenary and she was a nun and scribe in the famed monastery of Engelthal who nursed him back to health. As she spins their tale in Scheherazade fashion and relates equally mesmerizing stories of deathless love in Japan, Iceland, Italy, and England, he finds himself drawn back to life?and, finally, in love. He is released into Marianne's care and takes up residence in her huge stone house. But all is not well. For one thing, the pull of his past sins becomes ever more powerful as the morphine he is prescribed becomes ever more addictive. For another, Marianne receives word from God that she has only twenty-seven sculptures left to complete?and her time on earth will be finished.
Already an international literary sensation, The Gargoyle is an Inferno for our time. It will have you believing in the impossible.
Andrew Davidson Talks About Becoming a Writer
 Some of what follows is true.
When I was about seven, I had a turtle named Stripe. I decided, because I liked my turtle and Jacques Cousteau, that I wanted to be a marine biologist. This ambition lasted until I was ten years old, when I spent a year gazing into the abyss, hoping that the abyss would not gaze back at me. At eleven, I longed for a master to teach me the secrets of the ninja, but the teacher did not appear; this probably means that as a student I was not ready. As I entered my teens, I set my heart upon becoming a professional hockey player. On weekend nights, the final game at the local arena ended around 10 p.m. but the icemaker was unable to leave the building until about midnight, as he had to clean the dressing rooms and do maintenance. I bribed him with presents of Aqua Velva aftershave to let me play alone on the rink until he headed home. Despite my devotion, I never developed the skills to make it off the small-town rink and into the big leagues. My dream shattered, at sixteen I started to spend more time writing. I began by changing the lyrics to Doors songs. I rewrote "Break On Through" so that it became "Live to Die": "Soldier in the forest / dodging bullets thick / only took one / to make him cry / All of us just live to die." Clearly, writing was my future.
I soon realized that, since I still had no authorial voice of my own, I should at least imitate better poets than Jim Morrison. Soon I was word-raping Leonard Cohen, e.e. cummings, Sylvia Plath, William Blake, and John Milton. After writing much abusively derivative poetry, I moved onto stage plays written in a mockery of the style of Tennessee Williams, which also didn’t work out so well. Next, I tried to put baby in a corner, until it was explained to me that nobody puts baby in a corner. Following this, I produced short stories that would have been much better if they were much shorter. Then, screenplays that even Alan Smithee wouldn’t direct.
Somewhere along the way, I managed to get a degree in English Literature; this was strange, as I thought I was studying cardiology. Undaunted, off to Vancouver Film School I went, but naturally not to study film. Instead, I took the new media course, because there was this thing called the internet that was just taking off. I also spent a fair amount of time using digital editing software for video and audio. An example project: I slowed down the final movement to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, looped it backwards, put in a heavy drumbeat, and end up with a funeral dirge. "Ode to Joy"? I think not. "Ode to Bleakness" is more like it; I was very deep, and showed it by destroying joy.
After this course finished, I had tens of thousands of dollars of student debt, and could no longer avoid getting a job. I soon discovered, in no uncertain terms, that work is no fun. I stuck it out for as long as I could, which was way less than a lifetime. As my thirtieth birthday approached, I became incredibly aware that I had never lived abroad, so I moved to Japan.
I had no idea if I would like Japan, but I vowed to stick it out for a year. I did, and then another year, and another, and another, and another. In the beginning, I worked as a kind of substitute teacher of English, covering stints in classrooms that needed a temporary instructor. I lived in fifteen different cities during my first two years, traveling from the northern island of Hokkaido all the way down to the southern island of Okinawa. It was a great introduction to the country, but eventually the constant relocation became too much. I got a job in a Tokyo office, writing English lessons for Japanese learners on the internet. I lived in the big city for three years, and loved it: hooray for sushi, hooray for sumo, and hooray for cartoon mascots.
While in Japan, I entertained myself by writing and, having already mangled poetry, short stories, stage plays and screenplays, I thought it was time to give a novel a shot. A strange thing happened: I found that I don’t write like other people when it comes to novels?or at least, none of which I know. It’s true that I’ve read comparisons of my novel to a number of other books?The Name of the Rose, The English Patient, The Shadow of the Wind?but I haven’t read any of them. (To my great shame, really, and I suppose I should. Since they are my supposed influences, I should become familiar with them. I’ll appear more intelligent in interviews.)
I liked writing The Gargoyle, and I think I’ll write another novel. If I can, I’ll make up new characters and a new plot. That’s my plan.
Product Description
An extraordinary debut novel of love that survives the fires of hell and transcends the boundaries of time.
On a burn ward, a man lies between living and dying, so disfigured that no one from his past life would even recognize him. His only comfort comes from imagining various inventive ways to end his misery. Then a woman named Marianne Engel walks into his hospital room, a wild-haired, schizophrenic sculptress on the lam from the psych ward upstairs, who insists that she knows him – that she has known him, in fact, for seven hundred years. She remembers vividly when they met, in another hospital ward at a convent in medieval Germany, when she was a nun and he was a wounded mercenary left to die. If he has forgotten this, he is not to worry: she will prove it to him.
And so Marianne Engel begins to tell him their story, carving away his disbelief and slowly drawing him into the orbit and power of a word he'd never uttered: love.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 138 more reviews...
 Grotesque and lovely July 24, 2008
81 out of 95 found this review helpful
Read this book. Read it. Just shut up and read it, already. Are you reading it? Why not? I told you to read it!
"But it's yucky!" you complain. "The narrator gets all burned and gross, and he's mean, and what's up with the crazy lady?"
All right, yes, I will grant you, the first few chapters are incredibly difficult to get through, particularly if you have a delicate stomach. The unnamed narrator does, indeed, get in a horrific car crash where he is terribly, almost fatally, burnt. What follows is a stomach-turningly graphic depiction of what goes on in a burn ward. Stephen King would probably turn green at some of these scenes. You will be tempted to set "The Gargoyle" down and walk away. But I'm begging you to come back. Your suffering will be rewarded.
This is what Marianne claims, as she enters the narrator's life in the gown of a psychiatric patient at the hospital. She is jealous of his pain, as she believes that it means God has not forgotten him. Marianne is 700 years old, born in the year 1300 and raised in a convent. She is overjoyed when she meets the scarred narrator, as she believes that he is her long-dead lover returned to her. She then must set about convincing him of her story: of how the two fell in love all those years ago and how they were separated, about her divine mission to set her hearts free by carving huge gargoyles out of stone, and about the redemptive powers of love, suffering, and sacrifice.
So much happens in this book I don't even know how to start describing it. Marianne takes the narrator in and begins telling him stories. Interspersed with the tale of her own past are four other short love stories, set in eras and locations as varied as feudal Japan, medieval Italy, Victorian England, and Viking Iceland. These stories weave in and out of the main one, forming tentative connections and complementing its themes. Literary classics are alluded to as well, most notably Dante's Inferno. People suffer and die (or not), they sacrifice everything they have for love, they create powerful art and watch it destroyed, they journey to the underworld, and they approach God. And through it all are the two lynchpins of this book, love and pain, forever entwined, each intensifying the other, unwanted and unlooked for but present in every page.
This is quite simply one of the most powerful, intense, gripping, and captivating books I have read in a long time. Maybe it's too intense for some readers; I can tell already from the reviews that many are put off by this love story between the disfigured misanthrope and the schizophrenic artist. But if you have the strength to shoulder the burdens Andrew Davidson places on the reader, I promise, your suffering will be rewarded.
 Why is this book getting so much attention? July 14, 2008
66 out of 90 found this review helpful
This book is just so thoroughly mediocre that the media hype around it is beginning to bug me to death.
The main character is such a blatant male fantasy, I mean a super-hot, porn-star who can and does seduce any woman, is also a rich and talented entrepreneur, oh and he's a well-read intellectual too. This would be completely insufferable if he wasn't horribly disfigured in the first pages.
But, continuing the blatant male fantasy, a super hot woman (also independantly wealthy, smart and talented in a myriad of fields) just appears, already unconditionally in love with him, although he never seems to do anything to warrant this adoration.
For a book about a recovering addict covered in 3rd degree burns, The Gargoyle is also surprisingly low on conflict. There is certainly nothing driving the present day aspects of the plot forward. The secondary characters are one or two dimensional at best and nothing seems to happen to them either.
I will grant it this, the graphic descriptions of the car accident and of treatment for the ensuing burns were quite compelling. And the vignettes of love stories from the past were quite good. Perhaps Mr. Davidson needs some more practice writing short works, or should try gritty realism instead of this wishy-washy reincarnation surrealism stuff.
I really wanted to like this book, I mean, they wouldn't push the hell out of something if it was no good, right? But I never started to care about Marianne or the narrator, and gave up on it with about 50 pages to go.
And this book has nothing in common with the excellent Life of Pi.
 Didn't like it.... July 25, 2008
58 out of 128 found this review helpful
The narrator of this novel is drug-addicted porn actor whose tragic accident results in severe burning and months of recovery. The narration (first person) is frank and detailed, (and reminded me a wee bit of Anne Rice's Interview with a vampire), while he is in recovery he encounters a woman named Marianne who is insane (or so he believes) and who says she has known him before and claims to be born in medieval times.
I didn't enjoy this novel. I had trouble relating to the protagonist whose background just didn't appeal to me. The flashbacks and the story of Marianne held little interest. It also frankly do not care for first person narratives.
Overall this just wasn't my thing I guess.
Predicatable July 13, 2008
21 out of 42 found this review helpful
Only in America could a book like this receive the kind of coverage this book gets. There are passages that seem to be written by a teenager. Others are overblown and theologically simplistic and ridiculous. And its 480pp!!! Believe me, it is no surprise that this is the author's first novel.
Even love doesn't hurt this much August 3, 2008
21 out of 26 found this review helpful
After reading Andrew Davidson's debut novel, I am reminded of the famous quote, "Seldom have so few given so much to so many." Except in this case, it should be: never has any one been given so much, and made of it so little. This should be a good book; it is a brilliant idea, it has powerful themes and fascinating characters who are tangible and genuine despite their particular glitter, and Mr. Davidson is a good wordsmith. But it is not a good book.
The concept is a story of redemption through love, and of the glorification of the spirit through the mortification of the flesh. The narrator begins the story as a magnificent physical specimen who is spiritually dead; within the first five pages, he has put himself through a horrific car crash and subsequently been burned over most of his body. Davidson's descriptive powers are, somewhat sadly, never more evident than in his explication of life in a burn ward. I have been a Stephen King fan for decades, and I cannot recall the last time I cringed away from a page -- until now. The narrator, having lost all his ersatz self-worth along with his skin, is surviving his treatment with the sole purpose of being released from the hospital so he can commit suicide -- another description, by the way, which is almost poetic (but isn't) in its grotesque verisimilitude -- until a mysterious and mystical woman walks into his life. She is Marianne Engel, a mentally unbalanced sculptor who carves gargoyles, and she tells the narrator that they were in love in a previous life, in Medieval Germany, when he was a wounded mercenary and she was a former nun.
There is a wonderful love story here, but it is ruined by Davidson's abuse of cliches: the climactic confession of love read something like a junior high school girl's diary ("I love you, I really really love you, and I know that you love me and our love is pure, the kind of love that will go on forever loving and being loved in pure love forever and ever." Et cetera.). There is a story of art transcending the artist, but it is ruined by the artist's turn, while she creates, to a distasteful personality; this is part of the theme, I would think -- except there is nothing about the art, no redemptive beauty to counter the human grotesquerie. It just comes off as a juxtaposition: he started off as a selfish jerk, and as soon as he comes into his own as a person, she turns into a selfish jerk -- and for what? It isn't for the art, clearly. Are we to learn something from this? What do we learn here? That all love is doomed? Fine and good -- but in a novel about a love that lasted 700 years, that seems an odd message, and if it is the intention, it is ruined by the contradiction: an eternal love that cannot last. The parallel between two worlds would be interesting, but it is ruined by the author's penchant for bad cliffhangers at chapter breaks (I.e., "I recognized the man. I gasped his name in a whisper as the bag fell from my hand." And on to the next chapter.) There is a heartbreaking descent into loss and loneliness, ruined by the simple fact that it takes too long: the countdown, without trying to give anything away, should start at ten, not 27.
All of the lovely and interesting themes were utterly ruined for me by the failures and missteps of the storytelling. I realize, reading over this, that I sound like one of those petty heartless people who nitpick a good book to death, forgetting the beauty of the work in the scrutiny of tiny details, but it wasn't like that. The beauty was in the little details, and the majority of the novel was like muddling through a morass in order to get those little gems. In a world full of good and great novels, this one wasn't worth the time.
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