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Book Review
Jan. 17th, 2009 11:31 pmBathsheba
by Torgny Lindgren
I did not particularly like this historical novel about the Biblical Bathsheba and her life with King David. The writing style was terse and distant; I prefer my historical novels to be more descriptive. In Lindgren's version of the story, Bathsheba becomes very much the power behind the throne, engaging in subtle and clever machinations in order to ensure that her son Solomon rules after David. Yet Lindgren does note give any sense of immediacy to the plot. Neither of the main characters are particularly sympathetic or easy to relate to. David comes off especially badly - for the first half of the book, he is a real rat bastard, doing reprehensible things and then scraping off the moral culpability onto the people around him or onto God.
by Torgny Lindgren
I did not particularly like this historical novel about the Biblical Bathsheba and her life with King David. The writing style was terse and distant; I prefer my historical novels to be more descriptive. In Lindgren's version of the story, Bathsheba becomes very much the power behind the throne, engaging in subtle and clever machinations in order to ensure that her son Solomon rules after David. Yet Lindgren does note give any sense of immediacy to the plot. Neither of the main characters are particularly sympathetic or easy to relate to. David comes off especially badly - for the first half of the book, he is a real rat bastard, doing reprehensible things and then scraping off the moral culpability onto the people around him or onto God.
