Gargantua und Pantagruel (1532)

Possibly the jolliest books ever written. ( )

Tough one to review it doesn't really have a proper story it wanders around touching on pretty much every social subject you can imagine. I seriously wonder how much of it i'm actually GETTING. The version i read had no annotations, that coupled with the age, the fact its a translation and the humor which rarely dates well, i doubt i'm really absorbing more than 65% of the original text.
Its crass toilet humor is probably the highlight of the work as it's so strange to see in something this old and it's so basic that transcends time.
The last two books are the most 'Gulliver' like. Book 3 is the weak link being one longggggg joke which can be a bit of a slog to get through.
You'll need patience to read this as Rabelais's style is quite long-winded. Overall its interesting enough, i still prefer it to Don Quixote but not quite sure why people go nuts over it. ( )

In the fall of 1532, Rabelais published a very different sort of text: Pantagruel, the first of the comic works to which he owes his fame. The book's considerable commercial success did not keep it (or Rabelais's subsequent works) from being condemned by the Sorbonne, whose faculty of theology acted as the church's office of censorship. Nonetheless, Rabelais's patrons shielded him well enough that he could follow up on Pantagruel's success by publishing Gargantua in late 1534 or early 1535. Gargantua was in its turn both successful and highly controversial; Rabelais chose, in the increasingly dangerous politico-religious climate of the mid-1530s, to publish less and to avoid France as much as possible. He spent a great deal of time in Italy in the late 1530s and early 1540s, often with members of the powerful du Bellay family, who continued to protect him. After twelve years of intermittent exile and silence, Rabelais published, in 1546, the Tiers Livre. Given the controversy it excited, Rabelais judged it prudent once again to leave town, taking refuge this time in Metz. In 1548 he returned to Rome at the request of Cardinal Jean du Bellay, along the way leaving an incomplete draft of the Quart Livre with his publisher in Lyon. The latter printed it immediately, perhaps to the annoyance of Rabelais, who did not produce the final version until January 1552. The Quart Livre was, like Rabelais's previous volumes, promptly attacked by the Sorbonne, but thanks to the author's fame and connections the censors could not prevent publication.

The four authentic books together constitute a comic masterpiece of the first order, unique in Western literature. Pantagruel, in appearance a mass-market book, a parody of popular chivalric romances filled with superhuman heroes, fabulous monsters, and often obscene humor, is in fact an immensely complex work, combining features of popular literature with deep learning, topical satire, and enthusiasm for the ideals of Renaissance humanism. Gargantua, the story of Pantagruel's father, shares features (for example, its narrative trajectory) with its predecessor but is more sophisticated, eschewing at least some of Pantagruel's raw slapstick in favor of elaborate political and religious satire, a clearer commitment to a tolerant Erasmian Christianity, and a not entirely un-ironic reexamination of the humanist project. The Tiers Livre is the least overtly comic of the four books; it is dominated by the contrast between the humanist sage Pantagruel and his irrational, appetite-driven sidekick Panurge (from the Greek, in the sense of 'one willing to do anything'), who consults a series of more-or-less outlandish "experts" in order to find out whether he should marry. This opposition continues into the Quart Livre, in which Pantagruel, Panurge and his companions embark on a sea voyage to visit the oracle of the Dive Bouteille ('holy bottle'). The islands they visit are populated by a range of odd beings ludicrously secure in their own varieties of folly, and the voyage thus represents to the reader the limits of human understanding, and the consequent (and dangerous) absurdity of any claim to definitive interpretation or knowledge, especially in matters of faith. ( )

I'm done done done with this book and couldn't be more excited. It's like reading one of those teenage boy comedies... the humor is all about bodily functions and (classic though it may be) it doesn't contribute much to the quality of my life. I get why those old maids in The Music Man were so stubborn about it... and I don't get why they changed the song in the newest version (the alterers obviously never read it).

Hopefully, never again will I read this. ( )

Fiction