The Only Problem
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Condition: Good. Jacket: No dust jacket - cloth/board in good condition. Page Condition: Good. Markings: No markings. Binding condition: Good.
What does it mean to suffer — and what does God owe us in return? Harvey Gotham, a wealthy eccentric, has abandoned his wife and retreated to a farmhouse in France to write a scholarly monograph on the Book of Job, only to find that his real life is rapidly becoming as bewildering and catastrophic as the ancient text he studies. When his estranged wife resurfaces as a wanted terrorist, Harvey is thrust into a media circus that strips away his peaceful solitude and forces him to confront the very questions of innocent suffering he had hoped to resolve on the page. Muriel Spark's 1984 novel is a masterwork of ironic intelligence, weaving theological inquiry and dark comedy into a narrative that is as unsettling as it is elegant. Drawing a precise parallel between Harvey's predicament and Job's, Spark argues that the problem of undeserved suffering is not merely an ancient riddle but an urgent, lived condition — one that no amount of scholarly distance can contain. Written with the razor-sharp wit and cool detachment that define her finest prose, The Only Problem leaves the reader to wrestle with the same unanswerable question that has haunted humanity for millennia.
Author: Muriel Spark
Format: Hardback
Genre: Modern fiction
Condition remarks:
Condition: Good. Jacket: No dust jacket - cloth/board in good condition. Page Condition: Good. Markings: No markings. Binding condition: Good.
What does it mean to suffer — and what does God owe us in return? Harvey Gotham, a wealthy eccentric, has abandoned his wife and retreated to a farmhouse in France to write a scholarly monograph on the Book of Job, only to find that his real life is rapidly becoming as bewildering and catastrophic as the ancient text he studies. When his estranged wife resurfaces as a wanted terrorist, Harvey is thrust into a media circus that strips away his peaceful solitude and forces him to confront the very questions of innocent suffering he had hoped to resolve on the page. Muriel Spark's 1984 novel is a masterwork of ironic intelligence, weaving theological inquiry and dark comedy into a narrative that is as unsettling as it is elegant. Drawing a precise parallel between Harvey's predicament and Job's, Spark argues that the problem of undeserved suffering is not merely an ancient riddle but an urgent, lived condition — one that no amount of scholarly distance can contain. Written with the razor-sharp wit and cool detachment that define her finest prose, The Only Problem leaves the reader to wrestle with the same unanswerable question that has haunted humanity for millennia.