7) The Last Temptation, by Neil Gaiman
I have found a nice little second hand bookshop near work, on the rue Froissart between rue Belliard and place Jourdan. It has a decently eclectic selection of books in English, which rather look like they were mostly bequeathed by retiring British officials in the European Commission. Not all, though, and this graphic novel by Neil Gaiman sort of jumped out at me saying “Me! Me! Buy me!” And when a book says that, then I usually succumb to temptation.
And appropriately enough, this book is about temptation, written by Neil Gaiman in consultation with Alice Cooper, tying in with Cooper’s album of the same name. I know almost nothing about Cooper except that he wears make-up. Even so, I really enjoyed this brief tale of Steven, an adolescent who is tempted by the sinister manager of the Theatre of the Real (a Cooper lookalike) with the offer of eternal life at an unspeakable price. It would have been better to read it at Halloween; it would certainly have meant more if I was a Cooper fan; but I felt it was also in some ways a trial piece for Gaiman’s American Gods, and all the more interesting for that.
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Schiller’s take on the relationship between Philip II and the inquisition in Don Carlos is interesting. However since the rest of the play bears little/no relationship to actual history I don’t know that it’s to be relied on. He does suggest strongly though that the Inquisition was an important buttress of state power. It makes sense for that period given that the threat of converso revolt, with Ottoman support, was very real.