I made it about 1/2 way through and that's going to be it for now. Perhaps I'll give it another try a bit later. ( )

A great satire - read once a long time ago. I must read it again but how can I find the time? ( )

Well, it's done: I got through Rabelais. I plowed this 16th century classic of arse-wind symphonies, infarctious bum-hole fruppery, codpiece flip-flappery, and vertiginous piles of latinate verbiage, much of which only a scholar from the Beansquiddle School of Counterposed Argumentation and Juxtiperous Scholary Assidification would understand, or profit therefrom. . .

And for all that, it was fun. Yes, the complaint that I formed early on was that the writing was overwhelmingly verbose. Despite the outlandishly bawdy humor, it took forever to get through what I took for pointless descriptions, words piled up in a groaning sideboard of verbiage, chapters with no apparent aim toward what I supposed should be the meat of the enterprise: advancing the plot. But that complaint, I finally realized, was really my 20th-century American upbringing speaking: my get-out-of-my-way-I'm-in-a-hurry, time-is-money, let's-be-serious-I-don't-have-time-for this, nose-to-the-grindstone, and put-it-in-a-sound-byte upbringing.

By comparison, today's novels are written almost in short hand where an economy of words wins. Blogs must be digestible in two minutes or less. We can quit any newspaper article after only three sentences and come away with its essential point. We've basically re-written Descartes to: I stress, therefore I exist. . .

On the other hand, with 'Gargantua and Pantagruel' you have sat down with someone from the 16th-century and you must not be interested in getting anywhere in a hurry. You must be prepared to sacrifice the entire afternoon to careless, rambling conversation where the person repeats himself, gets sidetracked in colorful but pointless tangents, tells lewd jokes, flirts with passersby, pauses frequently to order more beer, farts at will, and has a love for rattling off endless lists: of popular games, of foods appearing at a banquet, of ways to run someone through with a weapon, or the best materials to use in an outhouse.

The characters Gargantua and Pantagruel are of a race of giants, and in a satire the figure of a giant is often a device for showing human traits writ large. It occurs to me that Rabelais' use of this literary device may be seen as a kind of rejoinder to Plato's 'Republic'. In 'The Republic,' man was writ large in the form of an ideal city to explore the question: how should a man live? Then, in 'Gargantua and Pantagruel,' perhaps the corollary occurs: the city or society is writ large in the form of a giant man to explore the question: what is the end of life?

And if this be the case, then Rabelais tell us, in effect, to chill! There you go! There's your modern urge to reduce everything to one formulaic pithy equation: just chill. Rabelais seems to be saying: what's the use in being so pretentious and tight-assed? Humanity is funny, flawed, tragic, comic, both beautiful and ugly - and driven by passion and appetite more so than its rationality. Relax, understand this, and stop pushing. If you don't mind bawdy jokes, gutter humor, satire, and enough crude body functions to start a riot in a whorehouse, this will be a delightful, if somewhat long read. Let it have its effect on you. On other hand, “If you say to me, master, it would seem that you were not very wise in writing to us these flimflam stories, and pleasant fooleries...” as Rabelais writes, near the end of Book II, “I answer you that you are not much wiser to spend your time reading them." Tis a sentiment truer than meets the eye, because to respond out of impatience to this book is to have missed much of the point. ( )

There are basically two episodes in this book that I think serve as a perfect litmus test for whether someone will like the whole thing. The first is that at one point Gargantua, who is the main character of the first part, describes to his father all the different materials with which he has wiped his ass. This is a list that goes on for several pages, and his ending choice is the neck of a live goose.

The second is a prank pulled by a character named Panurge. He takes a giant piece of dung, soaks it in the runnings from sores, and then smears it all over the ground where a bunch of scholars are going to hold a meeting. The fumes from this cause about twenty scholars to die, and others become horribly ill.

If you think that stuff is funny, you'll like the book. If you don't, you won't. I think it's one of the funniest things ever written.

A classic book of antiquity with all the humor and social relevance for our modern world ( )