A Guest Appearance
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I've been reading the Pickwick Papers and beginning Black Like Me. I like the latter quite a bit though I think it could use 'more showing and less telling' in the phrasing of one of my high school English teachers. I still think The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which I read for a seminar last year, is just about the best book ever, so all else in that genre pales before it. This is an opinion I've also formed for the Pickwick Papers, since at this stage in my life I'm reevaluating my opinions as to Dickens's gormless sappiness and finding him a magnificent and highly intelligent Colossus of an author after all. The contemporaneity of the book also strikes me, since scraps of dialect are sometimes an approximation of the modern idiom ('catch your attention,' for example) and I think that with a little rewriting it could portray present-day society just as well. I also like the flow and ebb of the little plots, which works quite well when I can only read a paragraph or a chapter or three chapters at a time. The idea of looking at society in its entirety, instead of shuttering it away from sight or whitewashing icky portions of it, as one would expect of the Victorians, is also very progressive (though Dickens does draw a veil over some things and work more by force of suggesting truths which we know than by blunt delineation); and I must say that I don't think we quite work up the nerve to do it very often now. What bothers me most about the Pickwick Papers is the bottomless sea of various liquor which is consumed in the course of it, because for the sake of verisimilitude I have to picture a dramatis personae's worth of badly cirrhosed livers becoming ever cirrhoseder.
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Posted by Edithor at 4:38 PMFriday, April 12, 2013
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| Penguin |
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| Oxford University Press |
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| 1st Ed Paperback |
Bildquelle Vignette: Maurice Barrès; La colline inspireé
Le Livre de Poche 1965
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