"My head hurts," said Shadow.
"You get a good breakfast inside you, you'll feel like a new man."
"I'd rather feel like the same man, just with a different head," said Shadow.
"Eat," said Mr. Nancy.
Shadow ate.
"How do you feel now?"
"Like I've got a headache, only now I've got some food in my stomach and I think I'm going to throw up."
"Come with me." Beside the sofa, on which Shadow had spent the night, covered with an African blanket, was a trunk, made of some dark wood, which looked like an undersized pirate chest. Mr. Nancy undid the padlock and opened the lid. Inside the trunk there were a number of boxes. Nancy rummaged among the boxes. "It's an ancient African herbal remedy," he said. "It's made of ground willow bark, things like that."
"Like aspirin?"
"Yup," said Mr. Nancy. "Just like that." From the bottom of the trunk he produced a giant economy-sized bottle of generic aspirin.
And in the Acknowledgments: "Lastly, I want to thank my family, ... who, for long periods during the writing of this book, put up with my going away both to write and to find America--which, turned out, when I eventually found it, to have been in America all along."
I'm still making up my mind about this book. Some authors wield their pens (or keyboards) with a firm grasp of language and style; others write of deep, tangible characters who make the world around them a story worth telling through their eyes and hearts; some weave tales through a beautiful but complicated lattice that few could produce themselves. The best do more than one of these things. Neil Gaiman, at least, in American Gods does not really master any one of these arts, and to be honest is rather lacking in the first two. As to the third, the plot is good, with elements of suspense, fantasy, mystery, and probably a few more things that would require more analysis than I'm willing to put in, but is not necessarily great. The world itself, however, is our own, but deeper, richer. Perhaps that's not true. Perhaps our own world does have the depth of his, and most of us simply do not see it. Either way, I've discovered a fourth property that can qualify a novel for greatness: the ability to give the reader the tools and the desire to think of, to question, to evolve his or her sense of the world. If nothing else, Gaiman succeeds in this, and he earns my praise. Something tells me that I'll be thinking about this book and its ideas for a long time to come, even after I've forgotten where the inspiration for the ideas originated from.
"You get a good breakfast inside you, you'll feel like a new man."
"I'd rather feel like the same man, just with a different head," said Shadow.
"Eat," said Mr. Nancy.
Shadow ate.
"How do you feel now?"
"Like I've got a headache, only now I've got some food in my stomach and I think I'm going to throw up."
"Come with me." Beside the sofa, on which Shadow had spent the night, covered with an African blanket, was a trunk, made of some dark wood, which looked like an undersized pirate chest. Mr. Nancy undid the padlock and opened the lid. Inside the trunk there were a number of boxes. Nancy rummaged among the boxes. "It's an ancient African herbal remedy," he said. "It's made of ground willow bark, things like that."
"Like aspirin?"
"Yup," said Mr. Nancy. "Just like that." From the bottom of the trunk he produced a giant economy-sized bottle of generic aspirin.
And in the Acknowledgments: "Lastly, I want to thank my family, ... who, for long periods during the writing of this book, put up with my going away both to write and to find America--which, turned out, when I eventually found it, to have been in America all along."
I'm still making up my mind about this book. Some authors wield their pens (or keyboards) with a firm grasp of language and style; others write of deep, tangible characters who make the world around them a story worth telling through their eyes and hearts; some weave tales through a beautiful but complicated lattice that few could produce themselves. The best do more than one of these things. Neil Gaiman, at least, in American Gods does not really master any one of these arts, and to be honest is rather lacking in the first two. As to the third, the plot is good, with elements of suspense, fantasy, mystery, and probably a few more things that would require more analysis than I'm willing to put in, but is not necessarily great. The world itself, however, is our own, but deeper, richer. Perhaps that's not true. Perhaps our own world does have the depth of his, and most of us simply do not see it. Either way, I've discovered a fourth property that can qualify a novel for greatness: the ability to give the reader the tools and the desire to think of, to question, to evolve his or her sense of the world. If nothing else, Gaiman succeeds in this, and he earns my praise. Something tells me that I'll be thinking about this book and its ideas for a long time to come, even after I've forgotten where the inspiration for the ideas originated from.