The Decameron

Rating:
Summary: A great bag of stories
Review: An Italian version "Canterbury Tales". A simple premise: there's a plague in Florence and 10 affluent young people (7 women and 3 men) decide to sit it out in the countryside. To amuse themselves, each one has to tell a story each day. 10 days, 10 people = 100 stories.

This is a great book in reading about medieval life in an amusing, non-dogmatic manner. There are tales of trickery that rival the Arabian Nights in their ingenuity. There are tales which relate to agriculture, injustice, knighthood, love and valour. Some of the days have all the tales on a specific topic.

One theme that I found most interesting was the treatment of sex. So many of the tales deal with it and it's done largely in a slapstick and carefree manner. This book is a sign that no church or social norm was ever successful in suppressing the popular erotic imagination in Europe. But even so, the licentiousness of some tales (in relation to the time they were written) surprised me - there are stories of amorous encounters between clergy and the opposite sex, of homosexuality, of multiple affairs etc.

Some of the tales are too long as they're stretched out to fit a literary style reminiscent of the medieval romances. But I found almost all the stories to be interesting.

As a note, I read the translation by Aldington which was very good but it feels to me after reading this work that many translations on the market would be just as good.

Thoroughly recommended and thoroughly entertaining!

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful Tales of Itlay During the Black Death
Review: I can't emphasize enough how enjoyable this book is. It is similar to Chaucer in some respects because the collection of tales are supposedly told by seven ladies and three gentlemen when they meet in a Florentine church to discuss how to avoid the Black Death. Each tale is a masterpiece in its own right. The tales are as lewd as Chaucer's, but the wit is dealt with a very light hand. But Boccaccio presents a very human world with his tales, and through this we get to know each of his storytellers very well. I recommend this book highly. It's a lot of fun, and it will make you laugh out loud.

Rating:
Summary: Dozens of good adult stories in one book
Review: I discovered this work in college literature class, and have since bought a copy to keep and read again. The setting is as interesting as the stories. In Italy, a group of young nobles (mostly ladies) gather at one family's country estate for a few days, hoping to escape the Black Plague.

Their attitude is, "What the hell, we could all die any day anyway, so let's have some fun." There's no mention of hanky-panky among the group, but the stories are full of it. Each day after their evening feast, they take turns telling stories of love based on a theme announced the the evening's appointed "queen" or "king."

The themes read like soap opera plots with trickery, foolishness, happy and sad endings, hard-won victories, convoluted and simple plots. The tales are universally human and continue into modern-day literature.

Rating:
Summary: Boccaccio's human comedy
Review: This fascinating fourteenth-century text is as complex as it is misunderstood. The premise is simple enough: the author creates a fictional set-up where, over ten days, seven female and three male characters who are cooped up in a country estate tell one another a total of 100 stories. The title, "The Decameron," literally means "ten day's work."

But this framing technique of ten narrators is hardly the point. The star of this work are the tales told by these sequestered characters. These 100 stories are chillingly sneaky in how they will mess with your mind. At first the tales will appear shocking, overtly sexual, or even knee-slappingly funny. (Think "Monty Python.") But in fact, like Aesop, the great Italian prose author Boccaccio tucks an ambiguous, gnawing moral into each tale. You will laugh at first, and then the bittersweet truth of each story's lesson will zap you.

The true brillance of "The Decameron" is that it is kaleidoscopic in nature: while all the tales are somewhat similar to one another, each story is truly unique in how it aligns its characters, its structure, its action, and its moral. The basic ingredients are similar in dozens of stories, and yet their outcomes prove to be wholly different. So instead of getting "re-runs," you the reader wind up in a quicksand-like universe where some good-hearted characters are punished, others rewarded, and some scoundrely characters are quashed while other soar.

It is Boccaccio's humorous (yet ultimately grim) portrait of our herky-jerky, you-never-know world, where a person can never be sure of his destiny despite his conduct, that makes this work brilliant. Behind the ribaldry and the chuckles, this late-medieval author proves that our world (sometimes benevolent, sometimes cruel, but always inscrutable) is, indeed, nothing but a human comedy.

Rating:
Summary: Boccaccio's human comedy
Review: This fascinating fourteenth-century text is as complex as it is misunderstood. The premise is simple enough: the author creates a fictional set-up where, over ten days, seven female and three male characters who are cooped up in a country estate tell one another a total of 100 stories. The title, "The Decameron," literally means "ten day's work."

But this framing technique of ten narrators is hardly the point. The star of this work are the tales told by these sequestered characters. These 100 stories are chillingly sneaky in how they will mess with your mind. At first the tales will appear shocking, overtly sexual, or even knee-slappingly funny. (Think "Monty Python.") But in fact, like Aesop, the great Italian prose author Boccaccio tucks an ambiguous, gnawing moral into each tale. You will laugh at first, and then the bittersweet truth of each story's lesson will zap you.

The true brillance of "The Decameron" is that it is kaleidoscopic in nature: while all the tales are somewhat similar to one another, each story is truly unique in how it aligns its characters, its structure, its action, and its moral. The basic ingredients are similar in dozens of stories, and yet their outcomes prove to be wholly different. So instead of getting "re-runs," you the reader wind up in a quicksand-like universe where some good-hearted characters are punished, others rewarded, and some scoundrely characters are quashed while other soar.

It is Boccaccio's humorous (yet ultimately grim) portrait of our herky-jerky, you-never-know world, where a person can never be sure of his destiny despite his conduct, that makes this work brilliant. Behind the ribaldry and the chuckles, this late-medieval author proves that our world (sometimes benevolent, sometimes cruel, but always inscrutable) is, indeed, nothing but a human comedy.

Rating:
Summary: A Great Book For Entertainment...FUNNY!!!
Review: This was a required book for me to read in my Western Civilization class and I thought that it would be a boring book because it was afterall, "ancient" history, but turned out to really be a funny book that I actually enjoyed and bought! A combination of love and laughter, this book will for sure keep you entertained.

Rating:
Summary: A Great Book For Entertainment...FUNNY!!!
Review: This was a required book for me to read in my Western Civilization class and I thought that it would be a boring book because it was afterall, "ancient" history, but turned out to really be a funny book that I actually enjoyed and bought! A combination of love and laughter, this book will for sure keep you entertained.