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Title: The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories by Mark Twain ISBN: 0-486-27069-6 Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: 21 February, 1992 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $2.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.14 (14 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: The Mysterious Stranger is Essential Today
Comment: I have taught this book at the college level for a few years now; it definitely sheds Twain's unfortunate Americana image, and it reveals the darker genius of this "beloved" author. Twain's greatest work, The Mysterious Stranger will enrage fundamentalist Christians, several of whom have dropped my course because of this novella. Asking people to think about what is real, what is behind existence, though, is no crime and should be inoffensive. Young people who are harmed by systematic thinking will react to this book like people being deprogrammed from a cult: they will hate it. But Twain, who was in anguish when he wrote this, had the honesty to ask difficult questions. Read The Mysterious Stranger as a guide to Twain's futuristic thinking, his tribute to the mind above all other things.
Rating: 4
Summary: Twain anticipates Crane in Mysterious Stranger
Comment: Aside from Twain's depiction of God as a malevolent and mischevious deity, the story illustrates Twain's pessimistic view of Christianity in general. There is much vitriol spilled - toward God - at the end of the work. Certainly the death of Twain's daughter had much to do with excentuating this antagonism towards God and religion. Mysterious Stranger, especially the chilling conclusion, is a disturbing tale - as Twain no doubt intended it to be. A worthwhile read but be prepared to have your religious moorings and faith shaken.
Rating: 4
Summary: Three supreme masterpieces, one ornery let-down.
Comment: this volume spans the length of Mark Twain's career, and contains some of his most famous shorter works, which all centre on the subject of Money. 'The Celebrated jumping frog of Calaveras County' is the most perfect tall tale in the English language, three flawless pages about Jim Smiley and the bizarre sidelines he would investigate to win a bet, any bet, written in a miraculous mid-19th century California vernacular. If that isn't enough, Twain tops it with the best closing paragraph of any work I have ever read ever.
'The $1,000,000 Bank note' is almost surreal, or Marxist, the story of a derelict made an unwitting guinea pig by two elderly millionaires, curious to see what would happen to an honest but poor man in the possession of such an impractible note. The frightening fetishistic power of currency structures a somewhat creepily benevolent narrative, and the opening paragraphs audaciously cram a novel's worth of misfortune.
'The Man who corrupted Hadleyburg' is the masterpiece here, at once an unforgiving morality tale about the temptation of money on an incorruptible town, and a satire on the crippling effect of bogus social respectability. Twain's irony is at its most relentless here, mixing anger at elite hypocrisy with distaste for the savage mob mentality. The scenes of public justice are hilarious but terrifying; the unnamed man taking monstrous revenge on a whole town for a personal slight, exposing its shams by an experiment, could well be Twain himself.
The same could be said of the hero of his novella 'The Mysterious Stranger', Twain's last, posthumously published work. In this, an angel, Satan, nephew of his infernal namesake, comes to a late 16th century Austrian mountain village and systematically exposes the murderous herd instincts, moral deceptions and shabby pretensions of the human condition. Everything - war, religion, society, justice, family, human aspiration, childhood innocence - is ground down with misanthropic, sub-Swiftian satire.
'Stranger' is not an easy book to like. As an historical novel, it is an utter failure, with no attempt to understand the mindset, never mind the language, idiom or customs of an alien culture. As an allegory for the contemporary America in which Twain was writing, the book is indispensible, insightful, brave, bracing, honest, incredibly prescient, but monotonous, flatly written and exhausting. As a supernatural fable, the book has little sense of wonder or of the unknown, but in its story of a devil wreaking subversive havoc on a socially repressive culture by playing on their hypocritical terms, 'Stranger' does look forward to Bulgakov's more successful 'The Master and Margarita'.
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Title: The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain : A Book of Quotations by Mark Twain ISBN: 0486406644 Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: 18 August, 1999 List Price(USD): $1.00 |
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Title: The War Prayer by Mark Twain ISBN: 0060911131 Publisher: HarperCollins Pub. Date: 25 February, 1984 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
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Title: Comic Effects: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Humor in Literature by Paul Lewis ISBN: 0791400220 Publisher: State Univ of New York Pr Pub. Date: September, 1989 List Price(USD): $64.50 |
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Title: Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain by Mark Twain ISBN: 0553211951 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 01 March, 1984 List Price(USD): $6.95 |
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Title: Humorous Stories and Sketches by Mark Twain ISBN: 0486292797 Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: 24 September, 1996 List Price(USD): $1.50 |
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