François Rabelais

[Hamlet]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/François_Rabelais


Any fans of this author?

I did a quick author search but he doesn't appear to have cropped up on WLF to date.

So it's welcome to Mr Rebelais.

[Hamlet]

GARGANTUA AND PANTAGRUEL

... a big hit with the Renaissance crowd....

[Heteronym]

The size of the book intimidates me. There, I've said it. But I want to read it; Milan Kundera speaks very highly of it in his books.

[Hamlet]

Yeah, I think it's one of those titles you place close by and eye suspiciously, and it stares straight back at you, and then somebody's got to break this routine.

So, having poured a beer, or a whiskey, you suddenly grab it and dive in, throwing your Martin Amis over the shoulder, and you find that you're in and it's not so bad afterall, but it doesn't last for long ... oh no, it's soon back to the comfort of Amis and a literary Mexican stand-off of sorts once again with the Rabelais.

it eyeballs you and you eyeball it right back.



I've been thinking about reading it for a while.

Buying it, I guess, will be the first step.

...

[Eric]

Gargantua & Pantagreul is really two great big rambling postmodernist novels avant la lettre. I've never managed to read much of them, but the two books contain weird descriptions, lists of words and obscenities, and all manner of irrelevancies. How he ever got it published in the 14th-15th century, and why he wasn't excommunicated or hanged God only knows.

Most French people read it in translation or in a heavily annotated version, as Rabelais' French is as antiquated as Chaucer's English.

Chapter 13 is full of swearwords, while Chapter 22 of Gargantua is a long list of all the games that Gargantua played.

It will appeal to people who like Tristram Shandy and Finnegans Wake.

[Daniel del Real]

Read it while ago and it didn't impress me. It's a very satiric piece of literature, full of criticism to the the customs of that time. It has a lot of very hilarious moments intertwined with scatological and orgiastic situations involving food and sex. I'm sure it was a really modernist publication at the time, but nowadays it has lost some of its charm and can be plot of the book can be considered weak.

[JTolle]

John Cowper Powys has a book entitled, Visions and Revisions, in which he gives a brief, effusive breakdown of all the authors he couldn't do without. Alongside Shakespeare, Dante, Whitman, and other greats, he also has Rabelais. I've certainly been interested in Rabelais ever since I read Kundera's tantalizing remarks in Testaments Betrayed, but Powys gave some interesting pointers. For example, he says that what makes Gargantua and Pantagruel a masterpiece are four things: food, wine, sex, and scatological humor. Food is Eucharistic. Wine is Mystical. Sex is Innocent. And the Scat is (apparently) a secret, but if you get it then you'll be in good with Rabelais.

[Hamlet]

I'll be buying this soon so thanks to those who have added a few extra comments since I last posted this up, there's a fairly new translation, by M.A. Screech, the same translator I've mentioned before with regard to all of Montaigne's essays, for Penguin.

[Hamlet]

John Cowper Powys has a book entitled, Visions and Revisions, in which he gives a brief, effusive breakdown of all the authors he couldn't do without. Alongside Shakespeare, Dante, Whitman, and other greats, he also has Rabelais. I've certainly been interested in Rabelais ever since I read Kundera's tantalizing remarks in Testaments Betrayed, but Powys gave some interesting pointers. For example, he says that what makes Gargantua and Pantagruel a masterpiece are four things: food, wine, sex, and scatological humor. Food is Eucharistic. Wine is Mystical. Sex is Innocent. And the Scat is (apparently) a secret, but if you get it then you'll be in good with Rabelais.

Thanks for this.

[Heteronym]

I'm willing to give a chance to any book recommended by Kundera. And Mikhail Bakthin also vouches for it. I'm halfway through War and Peace, and now Rabelais' book no longer seems so frighteningly gargantuan.