Gargantua & Pantagruel - François Rabelais (Books 1 & 2)
Biting and bawdy, smart and smutty, lofty and low, Gargantua and Pantagruel is fantasy on the grandest of scales, told with an unquenchable thirst for all of human experience. Rabelais's vigorous examination of the life of his times - from bizarre battles to great drinking bouts, from satire on religion and education to matter-of-fact descriptions of bodily functions and desires - is one of the great comic masterpieces of literature.
Parts of Gargantua and Pantagruel were banned upon their publication, and the whole of it has suffered in our century at the hands of translators too timid to say in modern English what Rabelais so freely wrote in Middle French. Master translator Burton Raffel unapologetically brings to life in today's American idiom all the gusto of Rabelais's language. Raffel succeeds in making Gargantua and Pantagruel, so long a great unread classic, accessible and alive to the contemporary reader.
OK, I really wanted to get through this, mainly to be able to say that I had. However, around the middle of the second book, I decided that being able to say I'd read it was not worth the irritation of actually reading it. The fact that the great comic masterpiece consists of little other than jokes about various bodily functions (including, but not limited to, pissing, shitting, eating, drinking, farting, belching, and fucking) and sheer absurdist nonsense makes me seriously question the use of the word "masterpiece." So all that was tiresome, but then in the second book, it starts getting downright misogynistic, beginning with a chapter featuring a discussion of building a wall out of female genitalia (which was not the terminology Rabelais used, I might add) because it's cheap, and not getting any better from there. I realize that misogyny was pretty standard for the time period in which it was written, but that doesn't actually make it worth reading.
Frankly, I think this book's historical value has caused people to ascribe greater literary value to it than it really has. The fact that it was among the first books in France, and maybe in Europe as a whole, to be written for the common people in the common language does make it historically relevant. I don't question that at all. However, in terms of its literary merit... Well, it did give us the word "gargantuan." That's something, I guess.
Aside from that, though, I simply don't think it's worth reading. I've left my bookmark in it, and maybe someday I'll think about reading the final three books. Maybe as penitence for something terrible I might someday do, I don't know. But for now? I'm so done with it.
Next up: Why We Read What We Read, by Lisa Adams and John Heath (Which, by the way, is already far more entertaining, and thus far, has not featured a single fart joke.)
Parts of Gargantua and Pantagruel were banned upon their publication, and the whole of it has suffered in our century at the hands of translators too timid to say in modern English what Rabelais so freely wrote in Middle French. Master translator Burton Raffel unapologetically brings to life in today's American idiom all the gusto of Rabelais's language. Raffel succeeds in making Gargantua and Pantagruel, so long a great unread classic, accessible and alive to the contemporary reader.
OK, I really wanted to get through this, mainly to be able to say that I had. However, around the middle of the second book, I decided that being able to say I'd read it was not worth the irritation of actually reading it. The fact that the great comic masterpiece consists of little other than jokes about various bodily functions (including, but not limited to, pissing, shitting, eating, drinking, farting, belching, and fucking) and sheer absurdist nonsense makes me seriously question the use of the word "masterpiece." So all that was tiresome, but then in the second book, it starts getting downright misogynistic, beginning with a chapter featuring a discussion of building a wall out of female genitalia (which was not the terminology Rabelais used, I might add) because it's cheap, and not getting any better from there. I realize that misogyny was pretty standard for the time period in which it was written, but that doesn't actually make it worth reading.
Frankly, I think this book's historical value has caused people to ascribe greater literary value to it than it really has. The fact that it was among the first books in France, and maybe in Europe as a whole, to be written for the common people in the common language does make it historically relevant. I don't question that at all. However, in terms of its literary merit... Well, it did give us the word "gargantuan." That's something, I guess.
Aside from that, though, I simply don't think it's worth reading. I've left my bookmark in it, and maybe someday I'll think about reading the final three books. Maybe as penitence for something terrible I might someday do, I don't know. But for now? I'm so done with it.
Next up: Why We Read What We Read, by Lisa Adams and John Heath (Which, by the way, is already far more entertaining, and thus far, has not featured a single fart joke.)