Gargantua - Softcover

Rabelais, Francois

3.24

4,349 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 2035893046 ISBN 13: 9782035893048

Publisher: Editions Larousse, 2013

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A fantasy of life amongst the monks and friars of 16th-century France. Within the text, Rabelais espouses a positive view of life in which tolerance, goodness, understanding and wisdom are opposed to dogmatism, pride and cruelty.

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Review:

'In his playful, pun-packed translation...with its talk of ''todgers'' and ''bumguts'', Andrew Brown, like Urquhart before him, is eager to communicate the riotous promiscuity - the ''boozy babble and idle gossip'' - of the stories. He borrows from a multitude of sources - Shakespeare, Chaucer and what in parts reads like a scatological P.G. Wodehouse...to create a wholly credible, modern, reinvigorated Rabelais who still jumps off the page after more than 450 years.' --Times Literary Supplement

From the Author:

Reading Gargantua today, it’s possible to see that Rabelais is the begetter of the picaresque novel. Like Cervantes, he is in tune with the unexpected. Nothing seems pre-ordained or designed to a plan – the storyteller (and Rabelais is a consummate storyteller and anecdotist of the most buttonholing kind) is free to go where he wishes, taking his characters with him. The method, such as it is, ensures continous surprise, and surprise is of the essence in such loose-limbed art. You feel, as you read, that Rabelais is delighting himself with his own conceits, but not indulgently so. He’s a satirist, too, and satire is the expression of contempt for the status quo. Rabelais loved, and was intrigued by, his fellow man, but there are aspects of authority that have to be ridiculed. And not just authority, since everyday meanness – financial as well as spiritual – has to be mocked. - From the Foreword by Paul Bailey

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