The Tempest Tales

Oddly fascinating. Very bad theology, but an interesting premise. Good one played on Bezal Bob. ( )

A fun, quick read! ( )

I just gobbled this up in audiobook form. This book is a tightly woven collection of short stories (not quite a novel, but not really independent stories either). The main plot trope is pretty familiar (person dies, heaven lets them be reincarnated to do something or prove something), and Mosley’s story has a few things in common with the others. One difference, of course, is that he sets the novel in Harlem with a black male protagonist. The angel ("Mr. Angel") who comes along with Tempest is incarnated looking like a black man, but he has no experience of racism (or anything else human for that matter). So there are some great conversations between them that allow Mosley to explain the world as it looks to his protagonist.Most of the tightly connected stories involve arguments between Tempest and Mr. Angel about the nature of sin. There’s also a simple love triangle, and at one point a “man of wealth and taste” (cf. Rolling Stones song) gets involved.On the surface the conversations seem to be about religion, and you’ll probably get more out of the book if you are glancingly familiar with Christian religious tropes such as St Peter, Heaven, Hell, judgement, Lucifer, and so on. (However, for reasons that are unclear to me, although I'm quite sure it's deliberate, Mosley never mentions Jesus.)But I don’t think the book or the conversations are really about religion when you get right down to it. Religion, and the bureaucratic, rule-bound heaven that Mosley makes up, is standing in for the system that glorifies government and corporations at the expense of people, that oppresses poor people and people of color, and that tries to brainwash people into believing that they have to mindlessly follow rules that don’t make sense in the real world. I’m afraid I’m making the book sound really dour and boring. There really are a lot of conversations about ethics and they get a little repetitive toward the end, but the book is playful and moving with lots of really funny moments. The audiobook is produced by Griot Audio, a division of Recorded Books that specializes in books by African-American writers, narrated by African-American performers. This book is really well narrated by Ty Jones. As a white person, I don’t know much about African-American speech patterns, and I don’t get as much out of reading books that rely on those speech patterns as some people might, because I can’t reproduce them accurately in my head. So it helps my appreciation a lot to listen rather than read. ( )

The narrative style of this book reminded me a bit of Langston Hughes' Simple stories. ( )

The perfect antidote to both stringent evangelicals and the new vogue of atheist apologetic bestsellers. ( )