Interact: Bookshelf

About the author: The influential comics artist Robert Crumb is best known for such outre works as Keep on Truckin’ and Fritz the Cat. Crumb was born in Philadelphia in 1943 to “a Marine father and Catholic mother.” His family moved frequently during his childhood, and ended up in Delaware in 1956 when his father retired after 20 years in the U.S. Marine Corps. Robert’s mother often behaved erratically and was probably manic depressive. Robert was a faithful Catholic until he was 16. His biggest influence during his youth was his older brother, Charles, who loved comics and co-wrote many of the comics they produced as children. Learn more at his website – http://rcrumb.com 

Notes on the book: One day 15 years ago, for no reason he can remember, Crumb decided he wanted to read the myths of ancient Sumer. Eventually he found a scholarly work that said some of the myths were similar to stories in Genesis. He read Genesis closely, and the idea of illustrating it clicked. He told a literary agent friend that if he would fetch a big enough advance, he’d do it. W.W. Norton & Company came through with $200,000, which seemed enough; Crumb thought he could bang out the project in a year or two. It took four. The 200-page book comes with a warning label: “Adult supervision recommended for minors.”

Crumb was fascinated by the raw power of the imagery in Genesis. He started with the idea of doing a satire, and instead decided to present it straight, verse by verse. “I was intrigued by the challenge of exposing everything in there by illustrating it. The text is so significant in our culture, to bring everything out was a significant enough purpose for doing it.”

In an interview with TIME magazine Crumb briefly discussed the challenges of drawing the character of God: “He has a white beard but he actually ended up looking more like my father. He has a very masculine face like my father. My problem was, how am I going to draw God? Should I just draw him as a light in the sky that has dialogue balloons coming out from it? Then I had this dream. God came to me in this dream, only for a split second, but I saw very clearlywhat he looked like. And I thought, ok, there it is, I’ve got God.”

“I don’t think Genesis is a good place to look for spiritual guidance or moral guidance,” he said. “I don’t believe it’s the word of God.” “At the same time,” he continues, “I think the stories are very powerful. I’m not out to ridicule them or belittle them.”

Not an atheist like his father, Crumb describes himself as a Gnostic, a member of that ancient movement searching for spiritual enlightenment. “I’ve spent a lot of time studying different religious traditions and I meditate,” he says. “I think that all humans have that need for some spiritual meaning.”"But,” he adds with a hearty laugh, “I don’t think you’re going to find it in Genesis.”

About the author: C.J. Sansom earned a Ph.D. in history and was a lawyer before becoming a full-time writer. Dissolution (2003) was his first book in the Matthew Shardlake mystery series.  They include Dissolution (2003), Dark Fire (2004), Sovereign (2006) and Revelation (2008).  He lives in Sussex, England.

Notes on the book:  Dissolution has established historian C. J. Sansom as one of the most promising new writers of detective fiction.  The book is set in 1537, when England is torn by the Reformation. The terrifying Henry VIII has proclaimed himself Supreme Head of the Church and his power is being enforced by savage new laws and a network of secret informers. A team of commissioners is sent out to investigate the country’s monasteries. At one, a commissioner is found dead, his head severed from his body, his murder accompanied by sinister acts of sacrilege. The hero, Matthew Shardlake, a hunchback lawyer, intelligent and incorruptible, is ordered by Thomas Cromwell to uncover the truth. His investigation involves him in treachery and danger, leading him to question everything he believes. The sights, the voices, the very smell of this turbulent age seem to rise from the pages.

One of the murder suspects is Brother Gabriel, the sacristan, who is strongly attracted to Commissioner Shardlake’s virile young assistant, Mark Poer.

About the author: Sarah Dunant lives in London. Her latest novels, The Birth of Venus (2003), and her most recent book, In the Company of the Courtesan (2006), are set in Renaissance Italy. She is the creator of private investigator Hannah Wolfe, featured in Fatlands (1993), winner of a Crime Writers’ Association Macallan Silver Dagger for Fiction.

The dark, wild tale of the Merovingian queen,Radegunda, helped Sarah Dunant while she was researching Sacred Hearts. 

“I first read Julia O’Faolain’s vibrant and strange Women in the Wall two years ago, just before I started writing my own novel about nuns in a 16th century Italian convent. I had just come out of a year incarcerated in libraries and archives in Britain and Italy, and my head was reeling with wondrous and terrifying images and ideas. Most writers relate to that feelings of panic as you put away the notebooks and move  to the keyboard, and I thought O’Faolain’s journey into a darker, wilder moment of history – the political and religious chaos of sixth-century Gaul and the life of Radegunda, who began as captured queen to King Clotair and ended as the founding abbess of a convent in Poitiers, and a Merovingian saint – might just help.”

Notes on the book:  Sacred Hearts is set in a convent in Ferrara, Italy, where a teenage nun attempts to break out to be reunited with her lover.  The novice nun, Serafina, is befriended by the convent’s apothecary, who initially tries to subdue her hysteria with herbal remedies. As an unlikely relationship builds between the two women, other figures stand watching and waiting..

Learn more about Sacred Hearts at Sarah Dunant’s website.

About the author: Peter  Manseau is the author of the memoir Vows; the novel Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter; and most recently Rag and Bone: A Journey Among the World’s Holy Dead.

He has won the National Jewish Book Award and the Sophie Brody Medal for Outstanding Achievement in Jewish Literature, and was shortlisted for the Mecantile Library First Novel Award.

A founding editor of the religion blog, KillingtheBuddha.com, and coauthor of Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible, he is currently the editor of Search magazine. In his spare time, he is both a doctoral candidate in religion and a lecturer in journalism at Georgetown University.  He lives in Washington, DC with his wife and two daughters.

Visit his website:  www.petermanseau.com

Notes on the book: Peter Manseau embarks on a global odyssey in search of the “dismembered toes, splinters of shinbone, stolen bits of hair, burned remnants of an anonymous rib cage, and other odds and ends” belonging to saints and other sacred figures. The result is an entertaining, sometimes affecting inquiry into man’s yearning for spiritual transcendence through the worship of holy relics, real or otherwise–from the Shroud of Turin to more obscure bits of clothing and body parts.

Manseau meets a cast of fellow enthusiasts–including a French paleopathologist who spends his spare time rummaging through the supposed bone fragments of Joan of Arc.

The veneration of relics is certainly not a thing of the past. The book relates that when Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI, he sequestered himself in his apartment with the heart of Saint Jean-Baptiste-Marie Vianney, patron saint of priests.

“Relics seem to me to admit that, yes, while we do have a spiritual dimension to our lives, we are also flesh under the looking glass of all those around us. Our lives and our deaths are witnessed by others, and what our lives might mean to them is mostly beyond our control. We are simultaneously people who need symbols to survive, and we are symbols ourselves. Our bodies – our toes and shins, our foreskins and ribs, our hands and whiskers, our teeth and hair – have the capacity to tell stories we cannot imagine. And the facts of our lives can be as mysterious and in need of explanation as anything that lies beyond.”

About the author:  Aelred of Rievaulx (c. 1109-1167) was born at Hexham, Northumberland, and grew up at the court of King David of Scotland. On one occasion when Aelred was in Yorkshire on the business of the royal court he heard of the “angelic men” of Rievaulx and, after visiting the community, decided to enter monastic life there. Aelred rose to prominence; he became novice master of Rievaulx and was then sent to lead a new foundation at Revesby, Lincolnshire. In 1147, when he was 38, Aelerd returned to Rievaulx and presided as abbott until his death in 1167.  Aelred’s charisma and devotion encouraged many to join the community and the number of monks and lay brothers rose considerably during his abbacy.

Aelred was one of the most influential men of his time. He counseled other abbots and bishops and corresponded frequently with kings and popes. He kept up a close friendship with King David I of Scotland, and acted as an advisor to King Henry II of England.

A contemporary, Jocelin of Furness, gives the following account of Aelred in his Life of St. Waldef: “Moreover, he was a man of the highest integrity, of great practical wisdom, witty and eloquent, a pleasant companion, generous and discreet. And, with all these qualities, he exceeded his fellow prelates of the Church in his patience and tenderness.  He was full of sympathy forthe infirmaties, both physical and moral, of others.”

Aelred fell in love with two fellow Cistercians. He described the second monk as “the refuge of my spirit, the sweet solace of my griefs, whose heart received me when fatigued from labors, whose counsel refreshed me when plunged in sadness…I deemed my heart in a fashion his, and his mine…We had but one mind and one soul…”

Notes on the book:  Throughout his life, Aelred of Rievaulx took great joy in his friends and he believed that by loving and being loved by them, we learn to accept and return God’s infinitely greater and enduring love.  Aelred saw friendship not as a threat to community, but as the cement of community. For Aelred, every true friendship opens onto the love of Christ, the dearest friend of all. “God is friendship,” he said, “and he who dwells in friendship, dwells in God and God in him.”

He incorporated his personal experience of gay love to write some of the best Medieval treatises on Christian friendship and the love of God. Aelred did not repress his homosexual feelings but integrated them into his monastic discipline and spiritual reflections.

“It is a great consolation in life,” he wrote, “to have someone to whom you can be united in the most intimate embrace of the most sacred love..with whom you can rest, just the two of you, in the sleep of peace, away from the noise of the world, in the kiss of unity, with the sweetness of the Holy Spirit flowing over you..”