Thistledown Press, 2006
Read by Aaron Tucker
Despite the title, The Atheist’s Bible is a compilation of stories that is deeply indebted to faith. While Judaism leaks into every story and guides each character, direct religiosity itself is at the fringes of the work. This collection instead puts a great deal of belief in the modern fable and the construction of urban allegory as a means to guiding a person’s morality. It is this balance between the traditional faith of Judaism and the immediately applicable tale that powers these works in tightly spun pseudo-parables.
The cautionary tales that Camenietzki constructs revolve around the Jewish identity and the secrets of old men. While most of the protagonists have set, stable lives, each is bent on allowing a secret, an indiscretion (most often a young woman), to ruin that life. The book strives to pull apart the normalcy, to destruct each character’s life. But, instead of coming to any resolutions, each piece leaves the protagonist a wanderer in his own story, living to serve as a legend, an example, to others who are to live after him. What the reader then gathers as “the lesson” from each story is that heroism is not the norm and that the reality of cultural tales are fraught with nomadic impotence and anger.
Yet, despite this willingness to discuss the unsettledness of its protagonists, The Atheist’s Bible rarely breaks away from its linear brand of storytelling. Each piece is straightforward with a clearly defined chronology and set of characters. This tends to blend the stories indistinctly together and the work suffers from each story not being set apart enough from the next. While the middle of the work tends to blend together as indistinct variations on a slim theme, the stories book-ending the collection, such as the title story, do ripple with a satisfactory sense of mythos and suburban chaos.
This book is neither scripture or bed-time fable, but it does resonate within the limbo of daily life, and its reader, like its protagonists, must grapple with the stories they are both constructing, valuing and accepting everyday.
