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Title: The Hunting of the Snark by Edward Guiliano, Lewis Carroll, Jonathan Dixon ISBN: 0-930326-07-5 Publisher: University of Virginia Press Pub. Date: 04 May, 1992 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.88 (8 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: "A Perfect and Absolute Blank!"
Comment: This edition of Lewis Carroll's hilarious and haunting nonsense poem was originally published as THE ANNOTATED SNARK in 1962. Featuring Henry Holiday's original 1876 illustrations and a plethora of critical supplementary material, this is certainly the best edition of the poem currently available. Martin Gardner, who is perhaps best known for his ANNOTATED ALICE books, provides copious informative notes, many of them intended tongue in cheek, that explicate the myriad mysteries of Carroll's enigmatic sea voyage. Particularly noteworthy is Gardner's inclusion, as an appendix, of A COMMENTARY ON THE SNARK, a wonderfully loony "explanatory" essay by one Snarkophilus Snobbs that manages to brilliantly parody and demolish any attempt to provide solemn scholarly commentary on Carroll's silly but strangely disturbing work. Nonetheless, in his introduction, Gardner takes the time to offer brief descriptions of some of the more notable serious attempts to "force the whole of the SNARK into one overall metaphorical pattern." We'll never know exactly what was going through Carroll's mind when he created this epic journey--especially since the author himself claimed that the poem was devoid of any meaning--but the many efforts to explain it away are often ingenious and entertaining.
Rating: 4
Summary: Honestly, some people are fanatics!!!
Comment: "The Hunting of the Snark" is a brilliant nonsense-poem. Yet Gardner has seen fit to put pretentious, geeky, ...pedantic annotations all over it. Now I like nonsense, but the vulgarly rational "sense" of some of these annotations irritates me. Do we really need to know that the word "BOMB" begins and ends with B (thereby relating it to the Boojum) and that OM is the Hindu name of God??? Do we really need to know of a political cartoon in which Kruschev says "BOO", and does Gardner have to tell us that he was trying to say Boojum??
Annotations should be done in the manner of Gardner's own annotations of Alice in Wonderland. Now those were annotations that made *sense*. Annotations that simply explained out of date concepts, gave relevant details from Carroll's own life, or obscure humour. That's all! That is what annotations should be like.
The pedantic geekery of these annotations remind me of the...games of Star Trek fanatics (or Sherlock Holmes fanatics).
The poem is brilliant, though; and the illustrations were funny, before the annotations over-analysed them.
Rating: 5
Summary: Ahead of his time
Comment: Lewis Carroll is brilliant in this piece. First of all the poetical music is perfect, absolutely perfect, and yet the words don't mean much. Many of these words are not even to be found in any dictionary. Be it only for the music, this piece is astonishingly good. But the piece has a meaning. I will not enter the numerical value of the numbers used in the poem : 3, 42, 6, 7, 20, 10, 992, 8, and I am inclined to say etc because some are more or less hidden here and there in the lines. Hunting for these numbers is like hunting for the snark, an illusion. But the general meaning of the poem is a great allegory to social and political life. A society, any society gives itself an aim, a target, a purpose and everyone is running after it without even knowing what it is. What is important in society is not what you are running after or striving for, but only the running and the striving. Lewis Carroll is thus extremely modern in this total lack of illusions about society, social life and politics : just wave a flag of any kind, or anything that can be used as a flag and can be waved, in front of the noses of people and they will run after it or run in the direction it indicates. They love roadsigns and social life is a set of roadsigns telling you where to go. Everyone goes there, except of course the roadsigns themselves who never go in the direction they indicate. Lewis Carroll is thus the first post-modern poet of the twenty-first century. He just lived a little bit too early.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
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Title: Phantasmagoria (Literary Classics) by Lewis Carroll, Martin Gardner ISBN: 1573922528 Publisher: Prometheus Books Pub. Date: November, 1998 List Price(USD): $9.00 |
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Title: Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll, Joel Stewart ISBN: 0763620181 Publisher: Candlewick Press Pub. Date: March, 2003 List Price(USD): $15.99 |
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Title: Alice's Adventure in Wonderland/Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll, Mervyn Peake ISBN: 1582342229 Publisher: Bloomsbury USA Pub. Date: October, 2001 List Price(USD): $32.00 |
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Title: Symbolic Logic and the Game of Logic by Lewis Carroll ISBN: 0486204928 Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: 01 June, 1958 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
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Title: The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition by Lewis Carroll, Martin Gardner, John Tenniel ISBN: 0393048470 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: November, 1999 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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