Product Description

The dazzling and exuberant moral stories of Rabelais (c. 1471-1553) expose human follies with their mischievous and often obscene humour, while intertwining the realistic with carnivalesque fantasy to make us look afresh at the world. Gargantua depicts a young giant, reduced to laughable insanity by an education at the hands of paternal ignorance, old crones and syphilitic professors, who is rescued and turned into a cultured Christian knight. And in Pantagruel and its three sequels, Rabelais parodied tall tales of chivalry and satirized the law, theology and academia to portray the bookish son of Gargantua who becomes a Renaissance Socrates, divinely guided in his wisdom, and his idiotic, self-loving companion Panurge.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #21790 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-26
• Original language: French
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 1104 pages

From the Publisher
New translation of a masterpiece of French literature.

From the Author
In the Author’s Prologue to Pantagruel, Rabelais compares his latest offering to its predecessor Gargantua thus: ‘I’m offering you right now another book of the same calibre, except it’s a bit more reliable and credible than the first.’ His tongue is in his cheek, as usual, but there is a sense in which Pantagruel is the ‘more credible’ of the two extraordinary masterpieces. The events recounted are as preposterous and bizarre as his readers would have expected, and the mischief and comic energy are undiminished. - From the Foreword by Paul Bailey

From the Inside Flap
'I saw Diogenes strolling about dressed magnificently in a great purple robe, holding a sceptre in his right hand, and driving Alexander the Great mad with his scoldings when Alexander hadn't repaired his trousers properly - all he got in payment was a great whacking from Diogenes' stick.'

Customer Reviews

A COMIC MASTERPIECE
As far as I'm concerned this is the greatest comic masterpiece in world literature and this translation is an outstanding achievement. Although I have read quite a lot of the work in the original French, having it in one's own language gives the book, and especially those passages generally thought of as 'Rabelaisian', more impact.
Furthermore, Michael Screech provides a concise summary at the beginning of each chapter so that the reader knows just what or who is the subject of Rabelaisian satire or parody. In this way footnotes are kept to a minimum.
Finally, it is impossible to praise too highly the skill and inventiveness deployed in translating all the puns and word play of which Rabelais was so fond. I might also add that the book is not just one long belly laugh: it is above all a lesson for life with laughter the cure for all ills.