Gargantua

Rabelais

ISBN 10: 2253907014 ISBN 13: 9782253907015

Publisher: Librairie generale francaise, 1998

Synopsis

Composé avant que l'Affaire des Placards d'octobre 1534 ne vienne mettre un terme à l'espoir de voir triompher les idées nouvelles, Gargantua est sans doute le plus " renaissant " des livres de notre douce renaissance. C'est le livre de tous les optimismes, celui où l'éclat de rire énorme de Rabelais liquide allégrement les Picrochole et les Jobelin bridé du vieux monde ; celui qui, grâce à Frère Jean, voit triompher l'utopie du bon prince et d'édifier l'abbaye de Thélème. C'est aussi le livre le plus personnel de Rabelais, sa version du temps retrouvé. Celui où l'écriture, haussée à la dignité d'un jeu, devient liberté. Le texte reproduit ici pour la première fois est celui de l'édition de 1535, avec les variantes de l'édition princeps de 1534 et celles de l'édition dite définitive de 1542.

About this title

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

Edition details

• Publisher: Librairie generale francaise
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: French
• ISBN 10: 2253907014
• ISBN 13: 9782253907015
• Binding: Pocket Book
• Number of pages: 492