Rating: 
Summary: Impressive
Review: It is very clear that the only person who really belonged to the desert of Palestine is the Badu and all others are passer byes.Espesially Musa.
The crux of the story is the confusion in christian culture religious and non religious resulting from the infusion of God and Man in one persenolity which we Moslems do not have.
In the book divinity is imposed upon Jeses(peace be upon him)for reasons related to human weaknesses of his companions who prefer to belive in a God they can touch and see rather than making the effort of believing in the abstract God.
Only the badu revered Jeses Knowing that he was only human.
Rating: 
Summary: yet another interesting offer from Crace
Review: Quarantine takes as its basis the story of Jesus' forty days in the desert. But rather than focusing only on Jesus, Crace introduces other characters into the picture ' Musa the conniving merchant and his put-upon, pregnant wife Miri; Aphas, an old man suffering from cancer who has gone into the desert as a last resort attempt at a cure; Marta, an infertile woman who is undertaking the quarantine in an attempt to prove her worthiness to bear a child; Shim, a wannabe aesthete who is perhaps not as above the worries of the secular world as he would like; and a mysterious Badu, a (perhaps) mad tribesman.Quarantine uses these characters to explore themes of belief and the interactions between humans when they are outside of their normal element. As with other Crace writing, the prose in this novel is terrific, and he manages just as well with descriptions of the landscape as he does his characters. This is a small ensemble for such an intense novel, but it works well ' we see society at large explored in this small microcosm. Unlike some modern-day tales based on stories from the Bible, Crace has not attempted to 'modernise' his story too much (unlike a past story I read which managed to have Judas as a paedophile, Mary suffering from breast cancer, and various gay and disabled characters to give it a more 'realistic' feel). He has managed to explore age-old themes in an ancient setting, yet bring a modern feel to the work. If you take your Bible to be the word of God, and don't like reinterpretations, I would suggest that you don't attempt this book ' you will probably throw it away in disgust. But for the rest of us, there is a great reading experience waiting in yet another offering from one of today's most eclectic and versatile authors.
Rating:
Summary: entertaining food for thought
Review: The place: a dry landscape in the Near-East. The time: the early decades AD. In their tent merchant's wife Miri notices that her husband's tongue is black and that he is running a high fever: "She put her hand on to his chest; it was soft, damp and hot, like fresh bread. Her husband, Musa, was being baked alive. Good news." Miri and the hated Musa are then left behind by the other merchants, so that Musa can die without hindring the caravan's progress. Stranded, they are joined by an odd bunch of individuals: five men and women who have come to the desert for 40 days (the origin of the word "quarantine") to fast and pray and be granted sanity, health, pregnancy or something else. One keeps himself entirely apart: an elusive, zealous young carpenter's son from Galilee, who soon becomes the object of speculation, mythmaking and awe, especially when Musa, after a brief encounter with the Galilean, confounds everybody's hopes and expectations by staying alive. It won't do to give away anything more of what happens, but the sense of place, the individuality of the characters and especially the interaction between them are marvellous. And things do not quite turn out as anyone with a smattering of knowledge of the the New Testament would expect. Or do they? Besides providing us with a great story the novel also gives food for thought to both atheists like myself and Christians with an enquiring mind. The orthodox had better read something else.
Rating:
Summary: Jim Crace's Quarantine: A New Vision of Jesus
Review: This is a truly astonishing novel that tackles the old story of Jesus's 40 days in the wilderness in totally unexpected ways. In Jim Crace's novel, Jesus doesn't last 40 days. He dies after 30, and the other pilgrims on his journey, with whom he never exchanges a word, leave on day 31. (With a deft touch, Crace structures his novel into 31 chapters.) All is not what is seems in this novel. Does Jesus perform a miracle by healing the brutal merchant Musa of a fever, or did the merchant recover on his own, coincidentally? Both are possibilities. Has Jesus risen from the dead at the end of the novel, or are his appeareances merely shimmering, insubstantial desert apparitions? Once again, both are possibilities. What you come to realize is that Crace in fact is retelling the entire story of Jesus and the faith his followers founded, compressing it into the space of 31 days in the desert. Some of the book's characters remind us of major figures in Jesus' life. Musa is a dark, demonic version of Joseph, on a journey with his pregnant wife. Marta reminds us of Mary Magdalene. There are others. What lodges in the mind most powerfully is the sense of renewed, resurrected life we find at the end of the novel. Jesus' fellow-travelellers leave the desert and get back onto the main commercial road, joining other men and women on the journey of life. And, Crace suggests, perhaps Jesus himself becomes part of the journey, taking his message of love and hope to the world. Qaurantine is truly a new vision of Jesus.
Rating:
Summary: The desert's story.
Review: Barry Lopez recently visited Boulder on his book tour, and mentioned that when he's not writing, he's reading Jim Crace and Russell Banks. He mentioned reading QUARANTINE in particular, and about Crace, Lopez said, "watch this guy." The Bible says that Jesus went into the desert for forty days, where he was tempted by Satan (Mark 1:12-13). "Go into the desert if you must, and fast," Crace writes in this imaginative tale of that forty-day retreat into the wilderness. "But do take care. For god is not alone up there, if god is there at all. But there are animals; and the devil is the fiercest of them all" (p. 158). Written, perhaps, from the desert's point of view, Crace's 245-page novel reveals that Jesus's wilderness "quarantine" would be "achieved without the comforts and temptations of clothing, food and water. He'd put his trust in god, as young men do. He would encounter god or die, that was the nose and tail of it. That's why he'd come. To talk directly to his god. To let his god provide the water and the food. Or let the devil do its work. It would be a test for all three of them" (p. 22). Crace's writing is so vivid that it allows us to experience Jesus's quarantine for ourselves. "No one had said how painful it would be," Crace writes. "How first, there would be the headaches and bad breath, weakness, fainting; or how the coating on the upper surface of his tongue would thicken day by day; or how his tongue would soon become stuck to the upper part of his mouth, held in place by gluey strings of hunger, so that he would mutter to himself or say his prayers as if his palate had been cleft at birth; or how his gums would bleed and his teeth become as loose as date stones" (p. 157). "They came to live like hermit bats, the proverbs said, for forty days, a quarantine of dayight fasting, solitude and prayer, in caves" (p. 11). In his fascinating novel, Crace introduces Jesus to other exiles, who had travelled into the Judean desert "mad with grief. Or shame. Or love. Or illnesses and visions. Mad enough to think that everything they did, no matter how vain or trivial, was of interest to their god. Mad enough to think that forty days of discomfort could put their world in order" (p. 12). Jesus's temptation arrives not in the form of a serpent or animal, but through the solicitations of a merchant, Musa. "For Jesus," Casey writes, "the merchant Musa and the devil were the same . . . he was a strong adversary for god" (pp. 154-55). Jesus knew that "angels and devils could not be told apart just by their looks," but as for Musa, "here was a devil then, sent to the wilderness, with death and fever as his friends, attended by four mad, unbelonging souls, to be adversaries to god . . . they'd come to tempt him from the precipice with their thin cries" (p. 112). Crace equates Musa's footprints to the footprints of "the burglar, the adulterer, the son who'd run away at night, the village sneak, the chicken thief" (p. 201). Crace is a genius, and following his barefooted hero's journey into the stony desert is a brilliant, stunning, haunting experience that will leave you open-mouthed in awe. G. Merritt
Rating:
Summary: God the Teenager
Review: If there are writers more protean than Jim Crace, novelists more determined than he not ever to write the same kind of book twice, they keep well hidden. Crace's previous novels had settings as varied as these: prehistoric earth (The Gift of Stones), metropolitan Britain a few years in the future (Arcadia), and Cornwall in the 19th Century (Signals of Distress). Lest we should see a pattern developing, he has gone hiking and this, his fifth novel and already something of a modern classic, takes place in Judea, two thousand years ago. The hero is called Jesus. He is from Galilee. He is a carpenter by trade. How original. Words lose their meanings and I suppose it is a sad reflection on the times to note that for most people now the word 'quarantine' conjures up the image of six months of doggy hell; or, just possibly, the director of Pulp Fiction. The founding meaning is gone to most, but the book reminds us that quarantine originally meant a period of 40 days and nights alone, often fasting, done with the aim of achieving some personal or spiritual goal. (The duration alone is retained in the French 'quarante'.) The supporting characters in Crace's novel are four people pursuing such a quarantine in search of relief for their respective problems ("madness, madness, cancer, infertility"). The fifth is Jesus, a young man of zealous disposition. The other four will break their fast every night: a sign that they don't really believe that god will provide for them, let alone that he will cure their maladies. Jesus is different: "His quarantine would be achieved without the comforts and temptations of clothing, food and water. He'd put his trust in god, as young men do. He would encounter god or die, that was the nose and tail of it. That's why he'd come. To talk directly to his god. To let his god provide the water and the food. Or let the devil do its work. It would be a test for all three of them." In a lesser novel, this could become the central concern: "Does Jesus live or die?" (Forty days? No food or water? What do you think?) But Crace deals the story more skilfully, by making Jesus only a little more prominent than the other quarantiners. The true central characters are a travelling salesman, Musa, and his wife Miri. Musa is a tough man and a cruel husband, whose reputation precedes him as he lies dying of fever on the novel's first page. When Miri goes off, with rather too much haste, to dig a grave for Musa, Jesus encounters him and he mysteriously recovers. Musa's subsequent faith in Jesus - he becomes obsessed with "the little Gally" - is matched only by his faith in himself. The scenery is littered with caves where the quarantiners stay, and Musa wastes no time in making them believe that he owns the land. He extracts rent from the afflicted four with no difficulty. Musa comes to resemble God. He fails to abide by the rules he himself sets. His vengeance is arbitrary. His power over the others rests mostly in reputation, unfulfillable threats and his forbidding appearance: at the same time he has a ridiculous unmanly voice, and his vast weight means that he cannot get up without help from someone else. He is a God, like all the others, who requires his believers for survival. But Musa is a second-rate deity, the Alan Partridge (if you will) of the first century AD: he is torn between abusing those weaker than himself and becoming obsessively worshipful of anyone in whom he detects power. Jesus becomes the object of his fascination, and it is not long into the novel when Musa (and so the others) start thinking of him as a 'healer'. The implication as the novel ends is that from the mouths of these half-dozen wanderers will be born the rudiments of Christianity. The crucial point Crace makes is that whatever Jesus actually does is not relevant. Religion, the novel seems to say, is based on belief not reason. As such it is beyond logical attack or defence. But the underlying themes are not half the pleasures of "Quarantine". The surface is divertingly beautiful. As ever Crace makes the scene and land his own, and the cruel Judean desert becomes vivid and full of character:- "This was the wind on which to fly away. Its gusts and blusters came looking for him in the cave, bursting in like rowdy boys to shake him from unconsciousness." "The salty scrubland was a lazy and malicious host. Even lizards lifted their legs for fear of touching it too firmly." Crace also is adept at firm characterisation, and when literary fiction suffers a dearth of really villainous characters it is a relief to have Musa, whose unremitting wrongdoing is perversely admirable. So broad is Crace's skill, that the reader feels that the whole book could be driven by any one of the factors alone: setting, plot, characters, themes. That he manages to sustain them all at once is (not literally) miraculous. Crace may not think much of religion but he has the gift of the greatest creators of legends: he makes you believe.
Rating:
Summary: Depends On You
Review: If it is the Bible that you adhere to, that you believe to be The Only True Word, this book is not for you. If you believe that Jesus was a historical figure and that the Bible may be allegorical and factual, this will provide you with ideas that are novel. If you are in the latter group you could even say that this is a work of historically based fiction. I really enjoyed this work and the writer, who conceived and executed the story, which some would call counter-factual history, and others would simply name blasphemy. I have never read, "The Satanic Verses", that so enraged the Ayatollah that he placed a death mark on Salmon Rushdie. The Pope to my knowledge does not have hit teams, so Mr. Crace need not hide. By the same token making the choice to vacation in The Bible Belt would be an unwise decision. I am not playing advocate, be it of the Devil type or any other. I simply comment on the book as literature that has received great acclaim. A good portion of the book is annoying. Jesus makes cameo appearances and the reader is left with the daily activities of others who have arrived to fast in their chosen manner for 40 days. When Jesus does arrive he unknowingly performs what traditionally is called a miracle, and I would imagine if he had the chance, this is one he would have regretted. This action that he takes assures us of the dominance of everyone's story with that of Jesus left in the background. As the book develops his experiences become more important, and by the end he commands the complete attention of the reader. For those persons of Faith, this book is easy to condemn before it even begins. The Author uses a quote that is dated 1993 that would seem to state his conclusion of this Biblical Story, and if a reader stops there I believe a mistake has been made. The writer will give many more reasons to toss this book aside, for not only is the expected primary character on the edges of this story, the balance is filled largely with Musa, a human that embodies most of the vile human traits a person can list, and a few unique to him. His is one of the more perfect renderings of a person whose presence has no redeeming value at all. Mr. Crace's Jesus is portrayed with human characteristics that are not what is traditionally written, and again this will bother many people. This man who will become for many The Messiah, is a man of great pride, he wishes to prove others wrong so that they will be forced to view him as right. And these matters are not of a religious nature. He is also portrayed as indecisive, as well as a man who's initial acts include tasks that are meant to summarily exclude any who do not share his views. The ending of the book is brilliant. For even though the writer has rewritten an integral tale of Christianity, he does not place anything in the path of Christianity to develop as many believe it to be today. A strong argument could be made that were this the tale that was contained in scripture, Jesus would be a more understandable figure. His confidence in who he was, and what he was meant to do would be more easily supported if this description of his 40 days in the wastelands was the accepted documentation. If Biblical Miracles are something the reader rejects on principle, reading this story could be argued to be pointless. I disagree that the story should be avoided by anyone. It is a thought-provoking tale even if you are not a person of Faith. Christianity has been present for millennia, and its adherents number in the hundreds of millions. So all you need to be to enjoy this work is a reader with an inquisitive mind that would enjoy contemplating the effects of this, "what if", scenario.
Rating: 
Summary: Good thing it's short!
Review: Quarantine was a waste of time. I plowed through to the end but only because it was short and I kept thinking it was going to get better. Or at least it would have some trick ending. It didn't. Save your money.
Rating:
Summary: A waste of time and money
Review: It's not unsettling, bizarre or anything remotely wonderful. It's a bunch of words signifying nothing. Incidentally, crace, the G in god is capitalized.
Rating:
Summary: A stunning journey
Review: Take five people, put them in caves for forty days of fasting and prayer.Add one caravan merchant near death, and a wife waiting impatiently for that event to occur. Now imagine that one of these people is Jesus. This is the basic concept of Jim Crace's incredible book. What transpires in this barren land is a haunting view of brutality and spirituality that will intrigue and fascinate many readers, and repulse others. By placing Jesus outside the Gospels and into a historical perspective, Crace has created a dynamic and challenging novel, filled with characters and events that are memorable long after the book is finished.
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