The Sot-Weed Factor (1960)

ebook

This book is kind of nuts.
In a good, hilarious way, I mean.
"I am Ebenzer Cooke, Poet and Laureate of this province."
"Well, I was once called the Traveling Whore o' Dorset, but I don't boast of't." Ebenzer Cooke has been waving his title in everyone's faces. So have been many others. Maryland is infested with poet laureates called Ebenzer Cooke. Henry Burlingame, on the other hand, is singlehandedly filling many shoes as he goes on a Mission Impossible-esque spree of changing disguises. Joan Toast is diligently working at supplying pox to the Indians. King Hicktopeake's ravenous Queen had been keeping, not only the king, but all men in the town perpetually fatigued. Highly confusing provincial politics and conspiracies are constantly afoot. An uproarious cast of characters is strewn all over the province. Their paths often criss-cross in such ways as to make it look like a bad case of Twister - where the proprietorship of hands, feet, torsos is difficult to ascertain. Hilarity ensues.

Unlearned in matters of the real world, Ebenezer Cooke soars high on wings of fancy and blissful ignorance. When forced to come up with an improvised bum-swab, he summons his knowledge of philosophy, history and literature. He has a way of jumping out of frying pan to land straight into the fire, a bit of a 'wrong place wrong time' syndrome. When he is is lucky enough, someone comes along to pull him out of the ditch, only to drop him into a bog later.
"His chair rose from the floor, passed through the roof of Malden, and shot into the opalescent sky. As for Maryland, it turned blue and flattened into an immense musical surface, which suavely slid northwestwards under seagulls."Perhaps my favorite thing about The Sot-Weed Factor is how it upholds the tradition of oral storytelling. Several episodes are incidents being leisurely related by one character to another, each story-teller adding a bit of his/her own color to the story. Some even care to drop a nugget of wisdom or two.
“Only the wittol can know he is no cuckold and only a dead man is safe from death.”Some of the stories being told are incredible enough to find a place in 'Ripley's Believe it or Not'. Many of the episodes that I was convinced could only be tall tales concocted to fool Ebenezer, turned out to be true. While some things I had believed, were revealed to be made-up truths. Who am I to call Ebenzer gullible then! There is no telling how the tide will turn in Barth's world. One small happenstance can set a contraption in motion leading to big, comic consequences.

Barth's ribald, irreverent, comic adventure has a lot going for it. Except the length, methinks. After a point, it does exude a 'joke being told one time too many' feeling. In any case, I did make it to the end of the story where the oh so polite author apologized. Ebenzer's ordeal ended and he had a chance to lie down to rest and perhaps sink back into his dreams and reveries.
“To me she is a woman. To you she’s a hallucination.”
___________________________________

I am willing to turn a blind eye if someone*** wants to steal a bunch of pages from my copy. This thing is too damn long.
Though tons of fun, too.

*** Jay Rubin - wink wink nudge nudge. ( )

Well-loved books from my past

Rating: 5 golden stars of five, with a rapturous yodel cluster

The Book Description: Considered by critics to be Barth's most distinguished masterpiece, The Sot-Weed Factor has acquired the status of a modern classic. Set in the late 1600s, it recounts the wildly chaotic odyssey of hapless, ungainly Ebenezer Cooke, sent to the New World to look after his father's tobacco business and to record the struggles of the Maryland colony in an epic poem. On his mission, Cooke experiences capture by pirates and Indians; the loss of his father's estate to roguish impostors; love for a farmer prostitute; stealthy efforts to rob him of his virginity, which he is (almost) determined to protect; and an extraordinary gallery of treacherous characters who continually switch identities. A hilarious, bawdy tribute to all the most insidious human vices, The Sot-Weed Factor has lasting relevance for readers of all times.

My Review: The book description is a bit weak-kneed, but I can't find a better one, and I detest writing the book reports with a passion.

A couple months ago, I started a re-read of this book that did not go well. I sighed. I snorted. I rolled my eyes, and cut up rough whenever we got into the book's faux-antique Englysshe. I was responding to it like it was a phauntaiysee nawvelle with majgickq and other such borderline-criminal goins-on. I put it aside, and I forgot it, except to renew it online from the Port Washington liberry.

Damn me anyway! Why can't I listen to my REAL self?! John Barth, my Real Self murmured, John Barth of The Floating Opera and this book which you adored thirty years ago, he deserves better than this, to which Angry Self replied, “Shut up you! Seven hundred plus pages of this phauntaaahsticall-ness will make us homicidal! Why not encourage me to read Dickens or Tolkien if all you want to is encourage me to massacre random strangers? Silence! Begone!”

Damn me! What an ass! I read the first six chapters and tossed the book aside! But...I did keep renewing it....

And today, today with two days left on my final renewal, to-goddam-day I pick the book up again. And I read the first paragraph/line. And oh damn me! Damn me! How beautiful, how simply and completely perfect it is, and how I wish I could boil Angry Me in oil!

In the last years of the seventeenth century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point.

Oh. Oh oh oh oh. I just had a crisis.

Now I *could* just power through the seven hundred-plus remaining pages in the next two days, ignoring all other beings and duties...to the detriment of our carpets, as the dog would be on her own re: eliminatory functions, and the complete bumfuzzlement of my houseys as I would not be showing up at the station to fetch them...but it's not on. It's just not. This isn't a book to be got through, it is a book to be appreciated, savored, delighted in.

I will await the tides of fortune washing a copy of my own back up on the shores of my private liberry. It is worth the wait. The rapturous narcosis of my first immersion has returned. Thirty years are as but a moment. John Barth is still there, his words as gorgeously deployed as ever they were.

Delightful. Delightful.

Damn me anyway! ( )

לא רק שהתגברתי על השפה הקשה ועל השמונה מאות עמודים​ ( )

An amazing piece of work, The Sot-Weed Factor is an hilarious satire set in the 17th century and written in a style that reflects that time. The many plot twists keep the reader going, and the colorful vocabulary is part of the fun. In one section, there are several pages devoted to a verbal name-calling battle between two women who come up with about a hundred synonyms for the word "prostitute." There are long conversations filled with double entendre, unbelievable boasts, and of course there's Ebenezer Cooke, one of the funniest characters one will ever encounter in a novel. ( )