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Title: Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais, Burton Raffel ISBN: 0-393-30806-5 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: September, 1991 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.07 (15 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: VOMITUS PRIMUS!
Comment: In a graduate school discussion of Rabelais with my advisor, the profusion of vomit, not to mention other corporeal effusions, in Rabelais "came up." I suggested the term "Wretch Lit" as a general epithet for literature of this nature, including Celine, Bukowski, P. Roth, et al. Anyway, Rabelais is more than just good puking fun, and much more than the root of a grand adjective; he is an artist of the highest calibre.
In the 16th century, when Europeans were just beginning to carve out long fiction as a form*, a development that would culminate in the 19th century when the novel became the dominant mode of belles lettres, Francois Rabelais led the French fictionist camp. His stories, while not exactly novels by today's reckoning**, are brilliant examples of longer fiction. His works are lusty, vivid, implausible, riotously funny, carnal, explicit, inventive, sensual and alive. He is a remarkably deft satirist and his major works--"Gargantua" and "Pantagruel"--give us a poignant, if sidelong, glimpse into the climate of his day.
The Everyman series is always good, and this is certainly no exception. Anyone who wants to understand, and to appreciate, the modern novel must begin with its antecedents--and Rabelais has a substantial place in this.
*Of course, the "novel," or something remarkably close to it, had long since flourished elsewhere, Japan and Egypt most notably. Lady Murasaki Shikibu, for example, an 11th-century writer, had developed the form further than Europeans would until the mid-19th century (misogynists and Eurocentrists beware!). Her "Tale of Genji" is a sophisticated story of Imperial Court society, a work of "psychological realism" that had no equal in Europe until Flaubert.
**Because they lack coherent linear plot, a classical "dramatic arc," and traditional character development, we don't call them novels, per se. Of course, postmodern novels don't have these elements either, quite often, yet we insist they are novels as such. Funny. Of course, scholars do love categories, especially when they fit neatly into a chronological schema. So, because Lawrence Sterne and Rabelais are from "the past," we can't call them postmodern, and we can't look at their writings as novels--they just aren't polished enough....
Rating: 5
Summary: Broad, Common, Vulgar, Crass and Unspeakably Funny!
Comment: If you thought the vulgar humor in such films as PORKY'S and AMERICAN PIE was a modern phenomena, you're in for a shock: both are fairly mild in comparison with the works of Rabelais, which plumb the depths of human crassness in full Renaissance style. Writing before European authors had codified the novel as a form, Rabelais presents a series of very episodic tales about the adventures of the giant Gargantua, his son Pantagruel, and Pantagruel's trickster friend Panurge--and the three vomit, belch, fart, and engage in a number of equally distasteful bodily functions across page after page in some of the funniest writings found in the whole of Western literature.
But unlike contemporary bad-taste comedy, Rabelais is hardly willing to let his reader go with just a laugh. There is sharp intelligence behind his naughty laughter--and he directs his considerable wit at everything from education to fashionable society in page after page of unspeakably hilarious incident. (My own favorite passage concerns the trick Panurge plays upon the fashionable, church-going lady who spurns his attentions; it never fails to throw me into near-hysterical laughter.) Vividly written and extremely memorable, GARGANTUA AND PANTAGRUEL is the sort of stuff they don't teach in highschool... and more's the pity: it would probably convert more students to the classics than all the Romantics combined. Truly serious scholars should, of course, compare various translations, but the Cohen translation will do the trick for the more casual reader. Strongly recommended.
Rating: 1
Summary: precursor of de Sade
Comment: I decided to read this after noting Henry Miller's enthusiasm for the book in The Tropic of Cancer (I figured if Miller liked it, it must be good). I was sorely disappointed. I have nothing against bawdy or scatological humor on principle, but I found Rabelais simply boring, tasteless, and completely bereft of genuine humor. This is the sort of thing that gets guffaws from 12-year old boys who think that simply using foul language makes them endlessly witty. If you want early novelists with a tendency toward the bawdy and/or scatological, I recommend Boccaccio, Cervantes and Sterne. And if you absolutely, positively must wallow in a cesspool of disgusting smut, go to the master - the Marquis de Sade.
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Title: Rabelais and His World by Mikhail Bakhtin, Helene Iswolsky ISBN: 0253203414 Publisher: Indiana University Press Pub. Date: April, 1988 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli ISBN: 0553212788 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 01 August, 1984 List Price(USD): $4.50 |
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Title: Michel de Montaigne - The Complete Essays (Penguin Classics) by Michel De Montaigne, M.A. Screech ISBN: 0140446044 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: September, 1993 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
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Title: Essays by Michel De Montaigne ISBN: 014017897X Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: July, 1993 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Don Quixote: The Ingenious Hidalgo De LA Mancha by Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra, John Rutherford, Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria ISBN: 0142437239 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 25 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $10.00 |
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