Gargantua (grands albums)

ISBN 10: 2206002906 ISBN 13: 9782206002903

Synopsis

Gargantua By François Rabelais

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

About this edition

• ISBN 10: 2206002906
• ISBN 13: 9782206002903
• Binding: Unknown Binding