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- Corsair
Fiction, Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945), Religious & spiritual fiction
With echoes of Calvino, Rushdie, and Saramago, this is a stunningly imaginative work that celebrates the tragic and joyous nature of existence on the grandest possible scale. "As I remember, I had just woken up from a nap when I decided to create the universe." So begins Alan Lightman's playful and profound new novel, Mr g, the story of Creation as narrated by God. Bored with living in the shimmering Void with his bickering Uncle Deva and Aunt Penelope, Mr g creates time, space, and matter-then moves on to stars, planets, consciousness, and finally intelligent beings with moral dilemmas.
But even the best-laid plans can go awry, and Mr g discovers that with his creation of space and time come unforeseen consequences-especially in the form of the mysterious Belhor, a clever and devious rival. An intellectual equal to Mr g, Belhor delights in provocation: he demands an explanation for the inexplicable, requests that intelligent creatures not be subject to rational laws, and maintains the necessity of evil. As Mr g watches his favorite universe grow into maturity, he begins to understand how the act of creation can change the Creator himself.
More books by Alan Lightman
Praise for Mr g: A Novel About the Creation
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The author of this imaginative tour de force is a physicist and he has enormous fun with some of the world's greatest mysteries, Informs, teases, makes the head spin. - The Times
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Here is the creation of the Universe and the young Creator who grapples with what he has made-and ultimately with responsibility and loss...a gem of a novel that is strange witty erudite and alive with Lightman's playful genius.
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this is a marvellous counterpoint to all the other nonsense there on creation. Lightman writes exquisitely, so this fable on space, time, matter and life is a wordfest that is securely pinned to the rational - making him a 'magic realist' of a refreshingly different stripe. - Nature
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a smart, droll account of how God, or god, or simply Mr g, came upon the idea of creating the universe. - Prospect
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This delightful novel takes the reader on a light-hearted romp through the development of the universe from the Big Bang to its cold dark end, addressing along the way some of the big questions that inevitably arise from the development of intelligent life.
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It would not seem possible for Alan Lightman to match his earlier tour de force, Einstein's Dreams, but in Mr g he has done so - with wit, imagination, and transcendent beauty. - Anita Desai
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Lightman's witty, charming novel. - The Scotsman
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Just as he did with his incomparable Einstein's Dreams, Alan Lightman again surprises us with a work that is utterly original in both form and content. Mr g is a philosophical fable which is at turns hilarious and moving, rendered with a literary hand so deft that the weightiest metaphysical topics levitate into pure delight. - Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
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