A review by michael5000
The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by José Saramago

3.0

Saramago's "Gospel" has a lot of interesting, amusing, and arresting moments. He "got me" several times, driving me to dive into the New Testament thinking "Surely that's not the Biblical account!" Results were unpredictable; sometimes it was an episode Saramago had created from whole cloth, and sometimes it was a remarkably faithful recasting. For much of the book, most obviously with the Nativity, the story occupies a halfway ground where it doesn't directly contradict the story we know, but is certainly not a conventional recasting of it.

And yet, for as interesting as that sounds, I found this to be the least compelling of the Saramago I've read. And, since Saramago doesn't exactly break his back to make life easy for the reader, you really feel the lack of compulsion.