Enough! I give up! 8+ hours into this audiobook I’ve finally decided I can’t take any more! Awful awful dreck!
Premise: Abraham had a local boy transcribe his thoughts on God into clay tablets before he left the land of Ur for Canaan and founded the Jewish religion. Nazis find some of the tablets during World War II and keep their find secret. Sixty years later, one of them decides his legacy should be that his good daughter and her Iraqi husband should be the discoverers of the Bible of clay. They begin an archeological dig for the rest of the tablets. A do-gooder priest, four revenge-minded Jews, jilted ex-partners, disbelieving archeologists, and the U.S. government hell bent on invading Iraq complicate matters.
So far, I really can’t find anything right about this. I knew it would be bad fairly quickly in, but I soldiered on for the train wreck value. I suspected it would be so bad it would be hilarious. But really, it’s so bad it’s tedious.
What’s wrong. The characters are all one dimensional. Not even two dimensional. They all have on track minds. They are also really repetitive. The writing sucks. Perhaps it was the translation, but I doubt it. I lost count of the number of times the author ended a scene with and then the group discussed the details long into the night.
So the details of the plotting are held off-screen, but she does treat the reader to excruciating level of what food and wine they partake. In particular, I got tired of how many times the character of Mercedes exclaimed her impatience with the pace of exacting her revenge. Got it! Shut it!
I also want to call out the reader. They got the wrong reader for this. She has a thick southern European accent, which I suppose is supposed to make the book sound exotic. But in reality, her reading sucks. Pauses in the middle of sentences, no pauses at the end. Little differentiation in tone or inflection for each character, and the author’s dialogue requires much skill when reading that aloud to follow along.
Not to mention that the plot is full of serious holes as well as contrived occasions. A Jewish archeologist discovers the first couple of tablets. Then a cable from Berlin comes in announcing the beginning of the war. Immediately the two Aryan archeologists shoot the Jewish ones, never bothering to find out where the tablets came from. However, later this racist has no problem living among Arabs or having them marry his granddaughter. The book opens with his granddaughter, though an accomplished archeologist supposedly but still an unknown, attempting to convince other archeologists to fund an expedition. Never mind that she has only blurry photographs, no paper, no analysis, and pretty much nothing at all. But of course, it’s the stuck in the mud archeological community that is wrong for dismissing her. Ugh.
Don’t read this. Dan Brown is better.
Other blogged reviews:
Title: The Bible of Clay
Author: Julia Navarro
Translator: Andrew Hurley
Cover creator: Shoreh Aghdashloo
Imprint / publisher: Books on Tape
Format: Audiobook
Length: 20 h. 18 m.
Publication date: 2008
ISBN-13: 978-1-41594697-8
Subject: Archaeologists — Fiction
LC classification: PQ6664.A8932 B5313 2008
I’ve been reading your reviews for some time now, and I’ve enjoyed them, but I’m pretty sure this is the best I’ve read. I can’t speak to how accurate the review might be, because I haven’t read the book (and won’t), but I loved the review. Nothing like a bad book to get a good reviewer rolling.
Levi
Love this review! And I can’t believe you put up with 8 hours of that!
It’s really bad. I thought it would be more plot bad, which I could handle and would have been fun. Really, I didn’t do the book justice with this review. It’s much worse than I make it seem.