Book 18: Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais

Well, I'm finally finished with the first four Song of Fire and Ice books.  I'll continue with the series whenever I pick up the fifth book but, until then, I'm moving on to other things.  First in line, another classic novel, a collection of five novels, actually.

Gargantua and Pantagruel was written in the mid-1500s and tells the stories of two giants: Pantagruel and his father Gargantua.  It's often cited as one of the best in world literature though, honestly, I'd never heard of it before I started this project.

So, here goes!  841 pages, which is less than my last 4 books and it has bigger type, woohoo!  120 pages a day or so should get me through the book in one week.

HUGE REVIEW:  It’s difficult to describe Gargantua and Pantagruel.  It’s like a combination of The Odyssey, Gulliver’s Travels and Don Quixote all mixed into one.  It’s an extremely crude book book by any standard, filled with drinking, sex, violence and… well… scatological humor.

Between the poop jokes, however, Rabelais actually has a lot to say.  The book is, essentially, very bawdy satire.  As such, it has biting commentary and even outright contempt for politics (with gluttonous, incompetent kings), religious orders (with monks that won’t defend themselves until their vineyard is under attack), the current state of education (with pedantic academics spouting overly-complicated nonsense words) and lawyers (with one judge who decides cases by throwing the dice). 

Rabelais doesn’t just criticize these institutions however.  He also adds his own ideas as to how they should behave.  As a product of the Renaissance, Rabelais believes that one should live fully and follow your instincts.  He preaches pleasure for the body as well as intellectual curiosity and study for the mind.  He was sincerely religious but skeptical of the excessive discipline and asceticism of the monasticism of his time.  It's really quite philosophical.

I would have attempted the French version of this book, but since it’s 500 years old, I didn’t have the confidence in my Old French as in my Modern French.  I can see though that, even through translation, Rabelais has a rare mastery of language.  He writes equally well from the perspective of the crude peasant as from that of the learned intellectual.  I’m sure the puns and plays on language in the book are that much better in the original.  The only real problem that I had was that my edition didn’t translate the many phrases of non-French: Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, German, Italian, Basque, etc.  My knowledge of some of these languages helped quite a bit, but I was thrown by phrases such as:  “Omnis bella bellabilis, in bellerio bellando, bellans bellativo bellare bellantes.  Parisius habet bellas.”  All I got was the ending, “In Paris there are bells.”

There are several chapters in the books that are essentially lists or catalogues  of various items, from insults to methods of fortune telling to lists of books in a library.  These can be quite tedious to get through, though they typically have quite a few wry comments interspersed throughout them and one of them, the list of books, produced my favorite title, “Of the Gentle Art of Farting in Company.”

All in all, Gargantua and Pantagruel is great social satire disguised as the adventures of two very crude giants and their associates.  Laugh out loud funny in parts, thought provoking in others.  9 of 10.