the secret chord geraldine brooks review

Even later, when Nathan has been an active participant in well-known events, he continues to listen and talk with others, and he clearly exposes his own subjectivity, his own misconceptions and misinterpretations. We listen to those who were there, and we hear what they say as filtered by Nathan’s “apparent” objectivity. Thus the reader gains a double access to David’s boyhood and to his infamous encounter with the gigantic Goliath. For example, Nathan was not present during David’s formative years, so he interviews the king’s mother, his brother, and other family retainers.

Second, by tracing the details of Nathan’s reconstruction of David’s life, she adds multiple voices. Her narrative, whether in the midst of battle, in the intricacies of court intrigue, or in the king’s boudoir, sounds plausible in a non-gendered way. This means that not only can he assess David’s voracious appetites from an objective point of view, but that Brooks herself can write from a neutral, if not neutered, stance. But I found myself much more intrigued by her narrative innovations, the methods by which she chooses to retell the familiar Old Testament stories.

They treat Brooks’ novel as one centered on the king. Reading other reviews of The Secret Chord, I found that the reviewers primarily have focused on David himself. So Gwendolyn Brooks has imagined, not that missing account itself, but the process by which Nathan was composing his version of David’s accomplishments and insufficiencies. The prophet and seer Nathan is supposed to have written his own account of his friend, King David. In both fact and fiction, his lifetime has been quite thoroughly explored. King David, of course, lived a long and colorful life, one of triumph and tragedy intertwined. But this time, because my knowledge of the Old Testament comes from childhood Sunday School rather than any recent studies, I wanted to check the biblical and historical backgrounds of Geraldine Brooks’s novel, The Secret Chord. Normally I don’t read fact checks or other reviews before I write my own assessment of a new book.

The secret chord geraldine brooks review