Savage Gods by Paul Kingsnorth

Savage Gods Reviews

• 
  Paul

  Kingsnorth thought having access to his own patch of land would settle his very being, give him a sense of belonging, somewhere where he could be rooted for the first time. An opportunity came to acquire a smallholding in Ireland and after a lot of thought, they grasped it. The family could begin a simpler life, growing their own food, homeschooling and become more in tune with the natural world. A place that they could call home and discover contentment for the first time in a very long time.
  
  Except it didn’t work out that way. He didn’t feel settled, nor that he belonged or had become an integral part of the landscape. Most troubling of all was the fact that the skills he had relied on for decades, the art of conjuring words into sentences, which he would then mould into a cohesive body of work were deserting him and he was at a total loss at what to do. It began to affect his outlook on life and he was starting to move closer to the abyss.
  
  His exploration of why this happened will take him back to the first alphabets and their connections to the things around us, how as our language evolved, the process of abstraction from the natural world came in stages until the letters we write with bear no resemblance to things any more. He considers the ‘European Mind’ and how the desire to quantify everything has also contributed to the breaking of the links between us and the places we inhabit.
  
  I regret every word that I have ever written, and every word I will ever write.
  
  And I stand by all of it.
  
  However, this disconnection to things that have been important to him all his life, has given us this searingly honest account of the meanders through his thoughts and feelings. The chapters vary in length from a few intense words to longer more reflective pieces. It does feel like the passages have had minimal editing too as you read what was swirling around in his mind at that very moment. He wonders where the words that were so freely flowing have gone, and if they will ever return. As well as pondering if the modern world with its relentless all-consuming consumption has robbed us all of the connections that we now need more than ever. Compelling reading indeed.
• 
  Leif

  Sad to say it, but this is one of those books that really should have been shelved. Kingsnorth's previous efforts have been disintegrating and the result is this series of loosely connected, egocentric musings about his ambiguous failures, his father, and his relationship with writing - none of which prove to be very interesting, if I'm being honest.
  
  This is all very saddening and frustrating. When Kingsnorth is on, he is punchy and witty, and his drive led to
  Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto, which is fantastic. But in Savage Gods all that emerges is rambling nothingness masquerading as thinking. While many writers are cited on writing, on aspiration, and so on, all that these citations do is illustrate the gap between someone like
  Yeats, William Butler or
  W S Graham and Kingsnorth - whether it be Yeats' talent for aggrandizing the spirit of his times and building his talent for nostalgic mythopoeia into a career as a statesman and public intellectual or W. S. Graham's utter devotion to the penury of success and the life of experience, Kingsnorth is left grasping after either pole but never able to articulate his own measure for satisfaction. Or, better, he seems unable to find his feet on the ground, which is ironic given the context of this book.
  
  At best, I would call this a process book - a text that helps its writer toward better understanding, but is of little use to its readers.
• 
  Beth Mowbray

  “The position I had painfully staked out in the world began to fragment. I began to fragment. I am still fragmenting, I think. Sometimes it scares me, sometimes it excites me. You have to come apart to be put back together in a different shape. You have to be reformed, or you rust up, and all your parts stop moving.”
  
  Sometimes a book finds you at exactly the right moment. The moment when you need to know that someone else has felt what you feel. That someone shares the same questions and doubts and anxieties about life. It’s funny ... I’ve had this book for a few months, intending to read it before now, but apparently it ended up in my hands exactly when I needed it. ❤️
  
  Savage Gods, a work of nonfiction, tells the story of the author’s move with his family to Ireland, where he hopes to find a home, a greater sense of belonging. Infused with the twinge of existentialism, Kingsnorth chronicles his battle with the words which are so important, yet elude him - his “savage gods” - as he finds himself unable to write after his move. At least, not in the same way he has written previously.
  
  There is such a raw vulnerability to Kingsnorth’s writing, where each chapter reads almost like a separate journal entry. There is also an interesting dichotomy of feelings throughout ... an alternating between feeling lost and knowing deep down what to do, an exploration of how one changes through the phases of their life and struggles through these phases to be content. In this way, although Kingsnorth focuses on his writing, the emotions and experiences are in many ways universal. Anyone who has traveled a long road in their life, only to realize the end of the road did not hold what they expected, is likely to find value in Kingsnorth’s self-exploration.
  
  For a short book (125 pages), there is so much more that could be said about this one. I find myself struggling to adequately capture the impact the writing had on me, so please reach out if you’d like to discuss this one more! Many thanks to Two Dollar Radio for the gifted ARC. Savage Gods is available today!
• 
  Ruth

  Ohh... This one went really deep with me.
  
  If you are in a particular place in life after a big storm that left you a changed person and you are trying to figure out what the hell had just happened or if you are trying to push against something but reality just wont cave in - this book is for you and for your inner demons and gods. The synopsis mentions that its about/for writers but I am not a writer and I still got so much out of it.
  
  I will be re-reading this slim book again and again.
  
  I would usually add quotes to the review but this book was one big quote all the way through and it felt so personal that it probably wont be very impressive out of context.
  
  I purchased this book in a hardcover format and I must say that the paper quality is outstanding. Very thick and heavy, snow-white, it was such a pleasure to touch.
  
  Thank you Paul for writing it and thanks to the publishers for publishing it in such a well made format (or whoever is responcible for some books coming out as such well made precious objects).
• 
  Niklas Pivic

  Writers are lost people. Nobody would write a book if they weren’t lost. Nobody would write a book if they were not in search of paradise, and nobody would be in search of paradise unless they believed it might exist somewhere, which means out there, which means just beyond my reach. Writers can see paradise, but can never touch it.

  
  
  This is a parable of a book, a journey that's gradually told via Ireland, fables, gods, and family. I've not read Paul Kingsnorth before, but he strikes me as a quite elusive man in his mid-forties, used to writing, prone to recollect without nostalgia.
  
  Perhaps the following lines say most about this book:
  
  

  I am a writer. Writing has controlled me and now perhaps it has become me. Writing has been put, always, before everything else, because if you don’t pay obeisance to the god then the god will abandon you.

  
  
  Communicating is an earthed way of trying to be god. One scratches at paper or a computer and hopes to have wrought out a more-than-passable line, and also trembles in lieu of anybody to speak with about what you've produced.
  
  There are quite a lot of short sentences in the book, of which many are familiar and some seem like attempts to stay forever, but after a while I thought, wait, they just seem that way; it's a matter of the author struggling with his raison d'être, at least as a writer, or something that nags at his soul, a banshee of sorts that he's trying to exorcise with words, perhaps as he, around two thirds into the book, heavily starts using deities.
  
  Other times, Kingsnorth's just funny:
  
  

  I’m a writer, which means that I aim myself at all of those things but fall short at all of them most of the time. Writers fall short at everything except creating sentences. This is what we really like to do: put words in an order which can conjure something real but unseen in the air around us, and around you when you read what we have put down. Really, this business of sentences is the only thing we can do and the only thing that motivates us. All the rest—the stories, the characters, the metaphors, the morals and the messages—they come later, with varying degrees of success. Everything is built on the sentences. We just love sentences, and we can’t get proper jobs.

  
  
  

  I feel that words are savage gods and that in the end, however well you serve them, they will eat you alive.

  
  
  This book strikes me as a whole middle-age crisis, other times as a quite existential view of how humans mostly work: most things aren't straightforward, and we're quite complex, yet simple beings. We're isolated, yet very intertwined.
  
  It's a good book to read, short, savoury, and sweet, and I would like to read another autobiography by the author, in circa 30 years.
• 
  Chris Roberts

  An ode to overthinking, to minutiae.
  
  Author as bastardized construct,
  proof-proof:
  In tandem with oblivion causal ratios, I calculate,
  quantifying hierarchical tasking rates in the frontal lobe.
  
  #poem
  
  Chris Roberts, God Once Again
  
  
• 
  Holly

  Well-written meditation by a middle-aged writer struggling with a kind of midlife writing crisis (but not writers' block). I suppose that I liked it, but it doesn't actually matter - he didn't write it for an audience, really, and I don't think he'd care too much whether his ruminations were profound to me, much less gave me "pleasure." Probably won't read his novels because it sounds as if they are immersive experiences (no windowpanes): e.g.,"Beast plunges [the reader] into a world ..." - which is not really my thing. But I will recommend Kingsnorth's fiction to friend who likes novels that cause him to forget to eat and sleep.
• 
  Curtis Anthony Bozif

  Kingsnorth is already polarizing in some circles, and this book, from what I've seen, isn't gonna help with that. And, I get it, I understand why some people are turned off by him and this book, but I'm not gonna waste my time defending Kingsnorth on the internet. I'll just say I'm a fan. His book, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist is one of my favorite books I've read in the past ten years. I also enjoyed listening to the audiobook versions of his two novels, Wake and Beast. All this to say that I'm biased. I'm a fan and it's easier for me to look past some of the more cringe worthy passages in Savage Gods. Luckily, there's only a few. And, he makes up for it by offering a lot of interesting thoughts about the creative process and being a mid-career artist entering middle age. Maybe this book should come with a warning: this book should only be consumed by practicing artists. What might sound narcissistic, egotistical, overly dramatic, or romantic to a lay person, will, to a serious artist, be relatable.
  
• 
  Jeremy

  Kingsnorth's off-the-cuff existential musings, about himself as a writer, about his wrestlings with spirituality, his grasping into the wind, his searching, his angst, his philosophizing, his need for silence and for something...
  
  Interesting to read even as a precursor to the author's conversion to Orthodox Christianity! Thankful for it.
• 
  Mallory Nygard

  asked a lot of questions I have asked (about words and belonging etc), but I found his process more fraught than curious
• 
  Chamidae Ford

  this was a 3.5 stars for me. loved the writing style and enjoyed the stream of consciousness but it ended up being a bit repetitive. i think it has some really good moments but at times i was like.....you've said this already.
• 
  Samuel

  man has midlife crisis, reads too much yeats and john zerzan, flirts with ecofascism, wonders whether writing is worth it or not, writes anyway
• 
  Gabriella

  God this was a struggle to read. That in itself is so disappointing, as I've really enjoyed Kingsnorth's previous books. Savage Gods just comes across as extremely self-indulgent navel-gazing... a particular scene where he flays himself over his inability to properly appreciate birdsong comes to mind.
  
  DNF at p. 65.
• 
  Peter Allum

  Kingsnorth is haunted by the alienation of modern life (being part of the "Machine") and has a strong urge to root himself and his family, get closer to nature. He moves to Ireland, buys a farm and some land, and practices Zen meditation. His memoire is an honest examination of the changes that he undergoes in the process. The outcome is very different from what he envisaged. He initially feels homesick for his formerly settled life in England; he feels that he begins to "fragment"--that he no longer feels that he knows who he is; he discovers that returning to the land is not going to "save him" in the way he had hoped. But rather than judging the move a failure, he discovers that something is urging him to further change his life, that he is undergoing some sort of spiritual metamorphosis. The wonder of this memoire is his willingness to write about the process even as it is ongoing and when he does not know the outcome.
  
  In reading Kingsnorth's memoire, Dogen's Mountains and Rivers Sutra came to mind:
  
  "Thirty years ago, before I began the study of Zen, I said "Mountains are mountains, waters are waters." After I got insight into the truth of Zen through the instruction of a good master, I said "Mountains are not mountains, waters are not waters." But after having attained the abode of final rest (that is, Awakening), I say, "Mountains are really mountains, waters are really waters." (Eihei Dogen, circa 1240, Mountains and Rivers Sutra.)
  
  Dogen can be interpreted as speaking to the nature of reality and selfhood. Before studying Zen, we view the outside world simplistically and at a remove: "that is a mountain, that is a river". Through Zen meditation, we discover the ever-changing nature of all things and the boundary between ourselves and the outside world softens. From this perspective, a mountain cannot be simply a mountain, because it is too complex, too wonderful, too evanescent to pin down. Is the silent mountain under a foot of snow the same as that when the bracken fronds are unfurling in Spring? And when we stand in a mountain valley, breathing in the clean air or wade in an icy stream, and as we glimpse the union between ourselves and nature, how can we speak of the mountain as an objective, external thing? Over time, these complications simplify themselves and dissolve and we can say: yes, the mountain exists, even though we know that its existence is contingent and ever-changing; and while our senses tell us that the mountain is separate, we know of the deeper unity between it and ourselves.
  
  Kingsnorth seems to be in the middle of this transition. His sense of a separate self--distinct from nature--has begun to fragment; he feels like he is being "cracked like a nut, split in the sun and left to dry", and that "a person is a process, not a thing". And he is getting a sense of the roiling, ever-changing nature of the world:
  
  "We tell stories of "nature" all the time, and one of those stories is that there is something called "nature" Out There, beyond the human, beyond civilization, which is another story. "Nature" is often somewhere we go to find peace: this is what it was for me for so long and still is. The green stillness. I can find great peace, great stillness in my field, but the field is never still. Everything is busy. The grasses and the trees are photosynthesizing, the insects are searching for nectar, the birds are nesting, chasing food, finding mates, fighting, the streams are ever-flowing, even the air currents are always moving."
  
  At the same time, Kingsnorth starts to doubt the purpose and effectiveness of his writing. His success as a writer has been based on his ability to stake out a personal position, develop arguments, find a satisfying storyline that links the introduction to a book with its conclusion. But as he starts to see his self of personal identity dissolve, argumentation and exhortation lose their appeal, no longer seem to speak his personal truth. And so, faced with Lao Tzu's teaching, he asks whether knowing and speaking (writing) are compatible.
  
  "He who knows does not speak, he who speaks does not know." (Lao Tzu, reputed author of Tao Te Ching, circa C6th-C4th BC.)
  
  Kingsnorth wrote Savage Gods from a place of spiritual insecurity and searching, not knowing whether he would find solid ground. For me, this is a high risk, existential project. Inevitably, for an avid reader and a compulsive thinker like Kingsnorth, it was difficult to forego philosophizing and some sections are less convincing than others (e.g., his imagined conversations with the Norse god, Loki). But, overall, a wonderful read. I look forward to his next book, when he has realized that "Mountains are really mountains, waters are really waters."
• 
  Jennifer Spiegel

  
  I have so much to say about this book!
  
  First, my friend--a TOTAL book reader--gave it to me, so I was gonna read it, even if I had never heard one thing about it. This was the same friend who, at one time, I considered "my first reader" of my own work, who gave me my first Ferrante, who makes her kids read great books . . . So, yeah, I'm gonna do it!
  
  Second, Mark Rylance wrote a blurb for it. I LOVE Mark Rylance!! (The Smiths also write the epigraph.)
  
  Third, it's published by Two Dollar Radio, an indie press that I think looks good. I kinda wanted them for my stuff. Never happened.
  
  Fourth, a weird moment of kismet . . . The author, publishing this in 2019, briefly--like, tangentially--mentions an encounter at at the nearby college (in Ireland). He attends a guest lecture by Colin Campbell, a 50-ish year-old white Botswanan SANGOMA (like an herbalist, faith healer, witch doctor) who lived in South Africa. I heard this . . . I looked him up . . . The photos: I examined them. . . Well, at 27 or 28, whenever it was, I was one of this silly American expatriates traveling in the Transkei region of post-Apartheid South Africa. I went on an overnight hike with some other expats--led by a white sangoma from Botswana who lived in South Africa. He'd be 50-ish now.
  
  I haven't actually dug up my old photos, which would likely solve this mystery. My guess: it's him. . .
  The book. Yeah, interesting--but I think not. Many, many great quotes on writing and the writing life. Memoir?
  
  Some issues . . .
  
  The entire book is pretty counter to the tenet both used and abused, but valid nonetheless: "show, don't tell." The bulk of the book is highly esoteric, TELLING. There is little showing, minimal use of scene, not a memoir that puts philosophy into action. It's a book of ideas. It's like watching someone sit in the most beautiful surroundings (the Emerald Isle) while clutching his temples and crying, WHY CAN'T I WRITE!!!! WHY? WHY? WHY?
  
  So, I'd be hesitant to call it a memoir--though everyone does. I think of memoir as showing a slice or multiple slices that reveal ideas in concrete experiences. I'd glean bigger truth from watching that white Sangoma do his stuff at 50+ rather than actually hearing his stuff . . .
  
  My other big beef: I think he's mildly a nihilist. Ultimately, I think he's saying that he struggles to write if there really only is silence? In the face of meaningless, we stop writing. I strongly, whole-heartedly believe that writing is an existential act, an esoteric but concrete one: we write to affirm meaning. I'm not quieted!!!!!
  
  But here's the head-spinning part, the What-The-Hellness part: Maybe he's not saying this, but I think he is?
  
  I did find many, many great quotes on writing. Here are some:
  
  “It's the blazing - the burning. It's the intensity of being: of love, of sorrow, joy, grief, brokenness, loss. It's the aching of all that is short and will soon be washed away. You have your one, brief, tiny, life. You have your pen. Can you convey the heat of it?”
  
  “I feel that words are savage gods and that in the end, however well you serve them, they will eat you alive.”
  
  "I'm a writer, and to me this has always been a calling, a duty. . . I have built my life around it: what the writing needs, the writing gets, and all else is secondary . . The writing needed me to stay on the edge, to stay burning, to stay ahead. The writing needed me, at some level, always to be unhappy."
  
  "Really, this business of sentences is the only thing we can do and the only thing that motivates us."
  And this quote by Czeslaw Milosz: "When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished?"
  
  Did I miss the point of this book?????
• 
  Dave Courtney

  I only became aware of Kingsnorth after hearing him speak in an interview with Jonathon Pageau. His story intrigued me enough to go out and pick up a couple of his books. Something about his journey resonated with the questions and struggles I was carrying with me in my own heart and mind and spirit.
  
  From the early pages it becomes clear that this is someone bearing the weight of personal regret. Savage Gods functions as a kind of autobiography (although he is not actually that old), looking back at and taking stock of his career as a writer, as an activist (of sorts), as a husband. Much of his focus revolves around reflections of space and time, wrestling with how it is that we find meaning in what often feels meaningless. Certain things push him forward, other things hold him back. And some things do both at the same time.
  
  This emphasis on space and time reverberates through reflections on history in light of the present, finding him unsettled with modernity in its tightly bound exorcism of the old gods. He is disenchanted, a growing problem within much of modernity. This comes out especially as he tries to contemplate his past as an environmental activist. He finds a sense of irony and conflict with the notion of something that was expressed in a posiitvely religious sense in a world that no longer has the words and language to make sense of religion. He pines for some sense of the Divine while at the same time persistantly drawn to nature itself, lost in the emptiness that seems to sit in the middle. At the heart of his story is a very specific decision on where to live, which eventually brings him back to Ireland. He is a wrestless soul who craves newness and change, and yet so much of his life has been left in uncertainty in his resistance to actually settling and growing in a particular space and time.
  
  As the book moves forward we see him wrestle more and more with his sense of self. If I have one gripe with this book it is with the familiar path this treads towards his most definiive expression of what you might call a belief system. Although to be fair he holds this lightly. All of this existential struggle eventually lands him (recently at the age of 40) in Zen Buddhism, an entirely Westernized iteration of an Eastern practice. I say this is familiar because Zen Buddhism has a particular allure for people in his position, those who find themselves disenchanted with modernism and looking for something to feel the void left by the exorcism of the old gods. It offers a form of spirituality detached from the religious, and often in its Westernized version detached from the Divine, or God. His articulated version of this practice in his own life outlines clearly its aim and trajectory- the loss of self and desire and the move into non-existence.
  
  Now don't get me wrong. I believe Truth can be found everywhere, but here is where I struggle. I don't think the loss of self and desire and this move towards non-existence as true liberation from the muddiness and suffeiring and struggle of this world actually gives us a way to confront and deal with the problems Kingsnorth is facing in his own life and journey, much of which I share and deeply resonate with. While it can certainly lead people to greater altruistic concern, I think when it is pared back and examined the solution of the abandonment of self and desire ultimately comes back around in its own to an elevation of self and desire. You can see this in the final third of the book where, in the absence of Truth and existence any hints of a clear path forward for Kingsnoth, as clouded as it still is (he revels in the uncertainty, the lack of answers), leads him to be content with simply being the illusion shaped by the unknown. He longs to write, and therefore speak and sing, with the silence of the trees and in the ways of the old myths, however he misplaces and neglects a necessary element of these myths that the Modern age has long forgotten- that they anhcor us in history as well as language and imagination and story. They aim necessarily at Truth. The qeustion with Truth is not that we know for certain (I resonate with Kingsnorth on this front), but that we can rest in it, grow in it, trust in it, and be shaped by it. Not in the scientific sense of truth, which can only ever demonstrate the funcionality of an idea, but in the deeply formed knowledge of our existence that becomes revealed in our participation within it. Truth is merely the conviction that this knowledge does in fact exist even where we don't yet fully see or know it. This is where I do get frustrated with tedencies to see liberation as the loss of Truth (be it the self, desire, illusions, God, existence). That to me feels empty, which Kingsnorth might, if I read him correctly, say is the point. Emptiness. A part of what draws me to my own faith in the Christian story, which shares much with the interests of Zen Buddhism on many levels, is that it calls us towards the opposite- a greater awareness of self, desire, Truth, existence, God. In this way we are enabled to become fully formed persons even within the necessary uncertainty.
• 
  Heather

  Savage Gods is a book about writing and a book about being stuck and a book about trying to figure things out. Kingsnorth writes about how he and his wife, Jyoti, bought a house and some land in Ireland because he wanted to feel connected to a place, and because he thought "that the work of being in a place would still [his] unquiet mind" (7). As it turns out: wherever you go, there you are, and if you're a writer with a tendency to be very much in your head, you will probably still be very much in your head even if you are also doing the physical work of planting trees and tending to fields and growing food. Kingsnorth fantasizes, sometimes, about a bigger change of place, a bigger change of self: "I would like to live on the Grand Canal. I would like to drop all of this and move to Venice with Jyoti and change my name and wear a linen suit every day and wander the streets and drink strange orange drinks in little bars down crumbling alleyways and gaze up at huge Tintorettos in dark old churches, forever" (96). But he doesn't, or at any rate hasn't yet. What he has done is written this book, which is partly about the specifics of his life (his sense that his old way of writing no longer serves him, his reactions against his father and his father's values, when he was younger, and how he feels when his dad eventually takes his own life) and partly about how he conceptualizes the mid-life moment he's in, which he describes in the context of a talk he heard by Colin Campbell about the idea, in Botswana, that "the first half of our lives is fire, the second water" (32).
  
  My husband read this book a few years ago and loved it, and I'm glad I finally got around to reading it, too, though it wasn't exactly what I expected. I was expecting more about Kingsnorth's daily life in Ireland, and I liked the moments when he writes specifically about the place he's in and his experience of it—like at the start of the book when he talks about the field he's sitting in and describes it as "a long, thin field, grass and dock and plantain and ground ivy, hedged in with thorn and sycamore and elder" (4). Or when he talks about trying to "resist the impulse to catalog" but admits that he's "been making a list for three years of all the birds that visit our land in the course of the year" and then gives us the "edited highlights": "Wagtail. Bullfinch. Dunnock. Wren. Collared dove. Robin. Long-tailed tit. Goldfinch. Swift. Swallow. Blackcap. Coal tit. Willow warbler. Sparrowhawk. Fieldfare. Pheasant. Heron" (28). But I ended up liking the other aspects of the book, too, in part because Kingsnorth's writing, at the sentence/phrase level, is really really satisfying.
• 
  Cari Lynn

  Words are unreliable.
  
  Savage Gods by Paul Kingsnorth speaks to me.
  
  The author explores his own paralyzing inability to feel connected to or find purpose in his writing. He’s moved to a beautiful rural area in Ireland, and for all his efforts, he fails to feel rooted, to feel a sense of home. Life is split in two phases, the first half defined as fire, the other half water. Fire emphasizes our passion and urgency to express, create. To be seen, heard and felt by the world. The fire drives us to make our mark on the world. The water eventually draws us in with time. We eventually surrender our hotheadedness and give ourselves over to the water.
  
  Kingsnorth has lived in many different places, always wrestling with a restless creative spirit, and yet never felt truly connected to a physical place in his life. His frustration with the obvious, immovable truth reminds me of my own creative struggles. I feel like a transplant in someone else’s space, never comfortable anywhere I inhabit. As I’ve aged, my ability to reach for words, the one thing I considered reliable, has become more a fight, more a struggle than a willful cleansing. Words have begun to haunt me in places it used to smile. Now they only jeer tauntingly.
  
  This book explores the complexities of humanity, existence and what you do with the rest of your life once you realize you’re not living the life you thought you’d have. I can relate to this struggle as I begin the second half of my thirties. The rest of my life looms before me, platoons of questions marching ever-closer to an unknown future.
  
  Savage Gods explores the depths of writer’s block, the alarming helplessness of identity crisis and the hopelessness that surrounds finding oneself and one’s place in a world that is growing darker and colder as the years go by. This book came to me at a time I needed it most, and I wholeheartedly appreciate my local library for carrying it. It spoke to the brokenness in me, even to wounds I was not previously aware of before.
  
  I'd recommend this book to writers, artists and humans alike that feel their backs are against the wall, to anyone questioning themselves and life in general, to anyone who still feels they've been swept up in a storm that has yet to relent. This book may not be for everybody, but perhaps it is for you.
• 
  Jeff Zell

  In the acknowledgments at the end of the book, in the same paragraph that he expresses gratitude to his wife and family, Kingsnorth says, “A book like this is a kind of ripping-open; delicate surgery which carries a high risk of failure.”
  
  Kingsnorth is indeed ripping himself open. After a lifetime of moves, and environmental causes, Kingsnorth and his wife settle into a small piece of land in west Ireland. Kingsnorth thought that now, finally, with a quiet place to raise chickens, plant trees, have a big garden, and just simply “be,” that he would have peace and contentment to think and write. He discovers instead that his mind is restless and that his words are failing him. Why is this happening?
  
  This small book of 126 pages of text reads like a personal diary. The chapters are brief but filled with agonizing inquiries, thought experiments. He tries to identify the “gods” which compel him. He writes of other writers and their own searches and finds. He speaks of his mind and spiritual practices. He tries to get beneath the words and the intent by using the very words that he feels are failing him. This is indeed a ruthless self-examination that includes observations about western culture, the sense of belonging, rites of passage rituals, and literary insights.
  
  I became interested in this book because I learned that about a year after Savage gods was published, Kingsnorth was baptized in a river by a Romanian Orthodox priest and thus received into the Orthodox church. I see this book as a lengthy and public repentance of false hopes and trusts and ambitions. He is writing his way to the promises and hope of the Christian God.
  
  In these pages are beautiful writings and descriptions and thoughts. This is my first experience with Kingsnorth beyond the occasional blog post. I look forward to reading his other books.
  
• 
  Crystal

  When you read this:
  
  

  My family is from the lower middle class, the most derided class in England. Not callus-handed and romantically oppressed like the working class. Not classy or rich like the gentry or the aristos. Not possessed of degrees or home libraries or big wine glasses like the haute bourgeoisie. Not exotic and in need of stout liberal defence like the migrants. We are the class snickered at in Roald Dahl books. We come from suburbs and have family cars and watch the telly in the lounge and live in medium-sized towns in unfashionable places and have never been to the theatre and regard the Daily Mail as a good newspaper. I’m not speaking personally. I don’t regard the Daily Mail as a good newspaper, though I do think it has quite a fetching logo.

  
  
  you have to wonder at the mental gymnastics that it takes to come up with this schlock. Maybe the lower middle class are the butt of jokes but running uncultured people from the suburbs out of the country isn't exactly something that elections are promising, is it? There was a marked difference between the levels of derision aimed at the two groups that I heard growing up as a middle class kid of immigrants living in the suburbs, one was simply sneering, the other likened you to a cockroach that needed stamping out.
  
  The rest was a bunch of meandering thoughts on losing his Muse and his sense of purpose. The section on his dad taking his own life was moving.
• 
  Edward Rathke

  Loved parts of this but also kind of rolled my eyes at other parts.
  
  This is very much a book for writers so I doubt I'd recommend it for anyone else. This makes the book both insufferable and insightful, sometimes at the same time. There was much I connected with here, like his overall view of the world and so on.
  
  His views about art and the artist, though, tread to easily into the mystique and mysticism that surrounds writers. It's a kind of mythology that, to me, lands somewhere between absurd, insufferable, and vile. This othering of artists in order to elevate them above and beyond the normal human ken.
  
  Even so, Kingsnorth is a great writer and this book is mostly pleasant and interesting to read. Of course, I used it as a toilet book, which is to say I read a few pages at a time over the course of a few months. For that, it was honestly perfect. Though it would be easy enough to read this in a few hours in the same day.
  
  But, yeah, some great stuff and some insufferable stuff.
• 
  Joel Zartman

  This is a book in which Kingsnorth wrings a story out of his decisions and cogitations and experiences. A kind of curated blog or an introspective series of short reports. It is what novelists are always doing, except they do not usually themselves feature as centrally. There is something refreshing about how Kingsnorth cheerily describes his battering against ideas by making them central to his life and showing how he picks them ​and what it ends up being like. He is doing what everybody else is, trying to figure himself out; he displays some exemplary wisdom in his self-deprecating approach.
  
  He has considerable literary powers.
  
  Paul Kingsnorth has considerable literary powers.
  
  I read this all on the day it arrived, and I look forward to going through it again in due time. If you need a comparison, I think he's most like Eugene Volodazkin.
• 
  Timothy Lumsdaine

  I’m not quite sure what I liked so much about this, perhaps it was the fresh and whole prose, the poetic nature of the style, or the thematic ruts that run through the work like garden hoses. It is, in many ways, an extension of the last 100 years of philosophy (Wittgenstein, Derrida, and Lacan all lurk beneath the surface), yet refreshingly, Kingsnorth has what feels like a healthy dose of Joseph Campbell sprinkled in, giving it a mystical flavor.
  
  Now as to why I like this more than The Anthropocene, God only knows; perhaps it is the intense literary and academic nature of this story. Perhaps it is because Kingsnorth is a MUCH better name than Greene. Either way, this book has planted something new, something not all together hopeless, in the backdrop of my mental landscape. We will see how it takes.
• 
  Maren Morgan

  I feel that I am too young to resonate so deeply with what is said in this book. I feel called, also, to quiet and to sitting in the uncomfortable space of confusion about my role in the world as I feel compelled to be a writer. The words I write feel fractal, like a lie, when I know that all of my thoughts are a lifelong conversation: dynamic, that which cannot be contained by the written word. Yet, I can’t seem to escape the reality that I must write. This book is helping me clarify my role in the world, and perhaps I can move forward more mindfully as I trek down this path. As someone who is seeking elderwisdom in the world, and only finding it in books, I appreciate the honesty and integrity of this book— to not feel so alone in my confusion is a blessing.
• 
  Hundeschlitten

  I like Paul Kingsnorth. I like just about everything he writes, and this is no exception. This thin tome has some rich moments, and it is a better and more informed primer on the creative process than many books that claim to be more specifically about this subject.
  
  It is also indulgent piece of philosophical meandering, at times to the point of irritation, and I could do without all the Zen tropes at the end that essentially undercut the goals and means of the artist striving with and against his world that defines most of this book. I don't know if there was a deep and elegant way to conclude Kingsnorth's contemplation on the nature of the creative life, but in any case I don't think he found it.
• 
  Kali Napier

  I suspect this memoir will resonate more with writers but explores existential questions that affect all those who spend their lives trying to belong somewhere. Kingsnorth cracked something open for me when he supposed, 'what if you just can't'. I was intrigued by the defining of life's hemispheres as 'fire' and 'water' -- the first half we burn with restlessness, the second half we settle, sink into the earth. I understood this, but also feel that I'm not a water person!! I am looking forward to rekindling my spark again. Through words. And leaving my own small landholding for urban climes, and a backpack. That is my mid-life crisis.
• 
  Abhishek Kona

  A writer who moves to Ireland so that he can patch of his land but as soon as he gets it he wants something else. The author is 40 odd years old but is obsessed with his legacy and his death.
  
  It's depressing, the human condition perhaps is, but only if you obsesses with it and this author does obsess. Perhaps thats what is fashionable in our times, to obsesses about how we have wasted time instead of getting a move on.
  
  Also most passages refer another author / book or quote—narcissism of writers IMHO.