Aztec

Rating:
Summary: One of my top 5 books ever.
Review: I am not sure any book has ever seemed so big to me. Gary Jennings captures a life from beginning to end. In the process he has taken me to thoughts I would never have believed possible. For instance, how can a culture make human sacrifice an honorable ritual and then see it degraded by priests who glory in the killing and blood. The novel is incredibly complex, gloriously full of life and courage and frightfully descriptive of man's hypocracy. A thoughtful person can not help but learn alot about humans from this book.

Rating:
Summary: I'm perplexed
Review: I'm honestly perplexed as to how people enjoyed this book (nothing against them, I read the reviews online before I started and was excited to read this book).

As other reviewers said, it's very annoying how the narrative stops every few chapters so that the main character can talk to the Spanish. I also feel Jennigs uses these interupttions to show how much of a difference there was between Spanish and Aztec culture. Hey Jennings - NO KIDDING. He was pushing the blatently obvious every few chapters making you feel like an idiot.

Another bad part was that it was hard to follow. The name of the main character changed every few paragraphs, it seemed.

Secondly, the entire book had no direction whatsoever. He randomly started doing things for no reason. I wanted to read a story, no some schmuck's life story!

If you haven't read historical fiction and want to kick it off with an epic, I would suggest Keith Follett's Pillars of the Earth.

Rating:
Summary: Narrative is annoying
Review: Having read James Clavell, this book was a disappointment. I was glued to this book after about 400 pages (and thats a lot of reading) and the next 700 pages or so were entertaining but there were often moments when I was forced to gloss over paragraphs. The book is the narrative of an aztec native, who is interrupted every chapter and sometimes in the middle of the text by the conquering Spanish for whom he is detailing his life. This is more often than not very very annoying. If you can ignore such interruptions, and the excessive details thrown in for not so good measure, you might enjoy the book. However the view that this provides into the ancient aztecs is truely marvellous.

Rating:
Summary: Had to stop after 600 pages...
Review: ... why? Because I really, really don't want this book to end. Stop isn't the right word - pause is better, because already I can recognize that this is one of the best novels I've ever read, and once read, it will never be new again. So I go back, reread certian passages, and just reflect on an ancient civilization that was destroyed. Yes the novel is brutal - some of the things Gary thinks up are really really bizaar - and yet this is an epic story that grips me and leaves me imagining about the Aztec culture. Interestingly, I never really had an interest in the Aztecs before this, which again is the mark of an excellent story teller.

One word of advice - don't read this late at night. You won't put it down and you'll never get any sleep.

Rating:
Summary: Epic of epics
Review: I first read this book about 12 yrs back. In all the years since, I have read and read and read, but nothing approaches this book as far as epic adventures go. If you like Alexander, Ramses etc. (which are very popular and can be found in any shop - unlike Aztec), it might interest you to know that they vanish into oblivion in comparison. Jennings is a supreme story-teller, and this is his masterpiece. The book has nearly everything: adventure, violence, sex, intrigue, and has a feel of the romantic about it. I cannot comment on the historial accuracy of the events, but don't let that stop you from reading it - Lord Of The Rings is complete fiction too, after all. I promise you you will soon be feeling smug about having read this one when others haven't and you will be recommending it to them soon.

Rating:
Summary: GREAT BOOK!
Review: The two things that change your life are the people you meet and the books you read.

This book made an impression on me. Both the Aztecs and Spaniards were brutal and capable of horrendous crimes against humanity. Man's dark side is documented in detail in Aztec.

The hero Mixtli, gives hope that man can rise above the crimes of civilization.

I kept thinking of the Grahan Nash song (Cathedral) that states, "Too many people have died in the name of Christ for anyone to heed to call". The unsanctioned barbarity of Cortez does not dismiss the sanctioned cruelty of the Catholic church.

Read this book.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Novel
Review: Aztec by Gary Jennings is like one reviewer said inside the critical acclaim portion at the start of the book, one book you will miss after you are done reading it.

This story of the Aztecs is told by Mixtli, a son of a limestone-quarryman. He travels around in the One world as a scribe and later a warrior and trader. He learns the true history of the Aztec people during his education in Texcoco before he is the personal "aide" to a scandalous wife-to-be to the Chief of Texcoco.

It is a story of many plot turns, twists, revenge, sex, blood, sacrifice and humor.

You learn of the many gods of the Aztec people, bizarre religious ceremonies and incest.

This book is shocking and offensive (not to me) but so is the bible (which contains almost exactly the same things). You'd know if you read it.

Mixtli tells his story, 60+ years of experience to Spanish Roman Catholic friars after the conquest of Mexico, you cannot miss this one.

I promise, this is the best ... value around, buy it, you'll be glad.

Rating:
Summary: My favorite novel
Review: Some would say it's sick and twisted, but I loved it. I first read it when I was 16 (many years ago) and it inspired a lifelong interest in history.

I know that Jennings played fast and loose w/ some of his cultural characterizations and details, but he sells it as fiction, not fact. It really is exhaustively researched, however -- many of the characters in the novel are mentioned in Meso-American records and lore. Jennings liked to use fact as a jumping off point -- he would figure out everything that we know about a historical people/era, and w/in the loose boundries dictated by fact, flesh it out.

Aztec really was his opus, the definitive Jennings. His other novels are worth reading, but after you've read one you'll recognize similar themes and characters popping up each time... (E.g. complex but sympathetic protagonist, sagacious practical mentor, pretty young boy, hypocritical and opportunist religious zealot etc...)

Jennings will [tick]-off everybody. Advocates of political correctness will dislike the tolerant but definitely condescending attitude of his protagonists towards his gay characters, and fact that the gay characters are always at least a little flawed and almost always suffer a horrifying fate.

In his more Eurocentric books, many of his non-white characters are presented as ignorant or conniving or both. His black characters in particular are generally flawed in some major way (for example, the one black character in in Aztec is coincidently the guy who unwittingly brought smallpox to the new world...)

His females tend to be semi-dull saints... or if clever, incredibly evil. The reader is definitely getting a "male" perspective through Jennings first-person narrator.

In a way that could offend the sensibilities of both the left and the right, his books are all ridiculously violent and often sexually violent. Certainly any sexual taboo is described in detail somewhere in his novels. I have a feeling that he has a small following amongst NAMBLA advocates, although I don't believe that Jennings was writing for this crowd. W/out exception though his books feature attractive young boys who are sexualized to some degree.

Conservative readers may take offense at his dipiction of Christianity as a opiate-like tool for opportunistic men. Christianity is a favorite target of Jennings, yet his books all have a thread of mysticism to them, as if God exists in spite of Christianity.

On a related note, Moslems in particular are also typified as uneducated, backwards and self-serving (not in Aztec though, which had no Moslem characters.)

Of course any historian who reads his books will have to take issue w/ the characterization of the inhabitants of the past as essentially 20th Century people. The protagonist is often successful specifically because he thinks like a modern Western person instead of a person of his era and culture. And Jennings core style of filling in the blanks of history is going to offend the Occam's Razor scientist-minded.

All of this is irrelevant in my mind. The books should be read by adults who understand that it is FICTION reality and are capable of drawing their own conclusions. If Jennings conventions offend, stop reading. If you find some of the more twisted (specifically non-consentual sex, non-adult sex or violent) concepts titilating, you are a sick [person]. Seek help. If Jennings was prejudiced against gays, non-whites, women or Christians, that was his opinion and he had a right to say it, even though I personally don't agree.

Jennings could've argued that the predudice is simply an extension of his protagonists attitudes, since most of his novels are written in the first person, and even though his protagonists are sympathetic they are products of their era and culture. (This is a valid argument, except that Spangle is written in the third person and is probably the most offensive to the Politically Correct.)

Anyway, you've been warned. Read the book if you can accept the above criticisms and you're in the mood for a big meaty tall tale. As a novel it is brilliant, only bogging down twice, at points where Jennings resolves lots of loose ends and doesn't quite leave enough hanging to keep you going. Muddle through those spots and you're in for a rewarding yarn.

Rating:
Summary: One of the Great Modern Novels
Review: "Aztec" by Gary Jennings is easily one of the best novels I've ever read. Jennings uses the life of one man, Mixtli, to tell the saga of the fall of the Mexica, the people we know as the Aztecs. During his long life, Mixtli is a scribe, a trader, a soldier, a mapmaker, a lover, and an adventurer who bears witness to his people reaching their greatest heights and their all too rapid descent from power.

Like his nation, Mixtli rises from poor beginnings, reaches a position of great wealth and power, and loses everything with the arrival of the Spanish. He tells his story to a panel of Spanish priests who have been ordered by the King of Spain to record the story of the Aztecs. Mixtli weaves his own tale with that of his people much to the consternation of the Bishop of Mexico. A letter from the Bishop to his King disagreeing with everything that follows precedes each chapter of Mixtli's tale.

I have no idea how historically accurate Jennings' work is. I only know that it is a fascinating story about a people who developed a civilization that was, in many ways, more advanced than the one that replaced it. It also raises serious questions about who had the civilized culture and who were the actual barbarians.

I do have one caveat for any potential readers. "Aztec" is not for everyone. It contains explicit descriptions of human sacrifice, maimings, cannibalism, and all manner of sexual activity including acts of homosexuality and incest. However, for the non-squeamish, it is a great, great work of recent literature.

Rating:
Summary: This book should be in a temple.
Review: Occasionally there comes along a book which, once finished, causes you to sit and contemplate in silence its final words.

Aztec was at times exciting, overzealous, profound, gratuitous, cheerful, and captivating, but on the whole it was tragic, for it is not so much a tale of a dying empire (and the means by which it died) but the life of one man and the fact that no matter how much we do, there are always regrets and missed opportunties. I have to say that having finished the novel, I feel unsettled and profoundly melancholy, but I wish I could read it again for the first time.

To those considering purchasing: I urge you not to read this book. For during every future reading endeavor you will likely be thinking: "I wish I was reading Aztec."