The Foot of God

About the Book

One often speaks of the hand of God. One forgets that his foot is more terrifying. Where he puts it, no grass will ever grow.

Le Pied de Dieu is a reading and a rewriting of the sacred text where Pierre Léon recreates the God he knew from a Catholic upbringing. He relates the Bible to us, sometimes in good humor and sometimes in bad! God, who is always serious and often wrathful, is unwittingly also very funny in his commandments, his injunctions, his sexism, his sexual and other obsessions.

In this irreverent text where parody is mixed with truth, and which is based on abundant quotations from the Old and the New Testament, Pierre Léon sketches the striking portrait of a God whom Bible school and sacred history had carefully concealed from us.

About the Author

Pierre Léon was born in France, the country of Rabelais. He lives in Toronto in the winter and in France in the summer. He has taught in France, in the United States, and in Canada. He has also given courses and lectures in a number of other countries. A laureate of the French Academy and member of the Royal Society of Canada, he has written numerous works and articles in linguistics, phonetics, phonostylistics, and literary semiotics.

And, perhaps to redeem himself, he has published a number of rather crazy stories for children and for adults, such as Pigou et Cie, Les voleurs d'étoiles de Saint-Arbroussepoil, or Le Mariage politiquement correct du petit Chaperon rouge; he has written poems and produced drawings, some fairly far out, such as Grepotame (Prix Loisirs-Jeunes); a picaresque novel, Sur la Piste des Jolicoeur (Prix Rabelais); fables (Prix Jean-de-la-Fontaine); short stories, and a play, La Nuit la plus courte, in collaboration with Monique Maury-Léon. His latest books are a novel, Un Huron en Alsace, and a detective story, Faut-il tuer Aline Merlin?