Gargantua & Pantagruel

Rating:
Summary: Not so..not so....
Review: Bakthins critics on GARGANTUA and PANTAGRUEL created too much stir over the book. But it is not so good, the jokes are too scatological and its popular knowledge does not aid too much, do not make us tremble so much as in DON QUIJOTE. Well, that's it.

Rating:
Summary: Fabulous
Review: I was gonna compare this one to Don Quixote to see another reviewer beat me to it! Well I shall anyway.

Both are one of the first examples of novels, both are extremely long, both are successful and funny satires of society (in this case of the 16th century) at large.

The difference is this book is much less philosophical and more slapstick. It has less high concepts and more toilet jokes. But that's what I found great about it! It is much more farcical and is about the furthest you can get away from realism. The author does not try to be consistent in terms of scale (the book - made up of five books - chronicles the life of the giants Gargantua and his son Pantagruel) but that's the point. Every conceivable historical figure and literary work is mocked.

I think this is one of the first postmodern works(!). Rabelais experiments with heaps of different text types, he has certain chapters which are lists of things pertaining to happenings (like insults hurled by two characters at each other - over 100 in all) etc etc. He goes off on tangents, talks about all the topics on earth from scholarship to sign language. And the antics of the characters are hilarious.

Personally I found this just a tad better than Don Quixote (4 stars). Yes, this book is also a tad too long. But it's actually five books and with short chapters on diverse topics, you can just pick it up and read another chapter. The translation is great, using white space and punctuation in a very unique way and highlighting the comic nature of the book. In fact, Urquhart's translation is a masterpiece in itself.

A great, great book to knock down your sense of decency and pompousness.

Rating:
Summary: The Horror! THE HORROR!!!!!!!!!!
Review: In nine short words: This is the worst book I have ever read. It is awful, simply awful! First of all, it's 800+ pages long, so it takes ages to read. The jokes that are supposed to be rude are outdated and disgusting. The only upside of this is that that's where the word 'Gargantuan' came from, and I don't think we could live without that word.