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The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton
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The Man Who Was Thursday

by G. K. Chesterton

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2,214551,364 (3.91)69

Member recommendations

  1. rockhopper_penguin recommends The secret adversary by Agatha Christie, "I read 'The Secret Adversary' just after reading 'The Man Who Was Thursday'. At the time, 'The Secret Adversary' seemed like the book you *thought* you (see more) were getting for quite a lot of 'The Man Who Was Thursday'. Clever, and a good mystery, but not as good (or weird) as 'The Man Who Was Thursday'."
  2. sirparsifal recommends Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  3. sirparsifal recommends Ulysses (Cliffs Notes) by Edward A. Kopper
  4. flissp recommends Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
  5. ben_a recommends Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin
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Showing 1-5 of 53 (next | show all)
It would probably be best to get hit by a bus just before you get to the end of this book. Tense chase sequences and a quickly increasing desire to find out exaclty what is going on are let down by the ridiculous half baked ending.
A good yarn but the exciting romp through europe and london only lead to disapointment and a little bit of anger. ( )
  JamesAbdulla | Oct 1, 2009 |
On the cover of The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare, there's a sentence from a review by Kingsley Amis where he calls this book "The most thrilling book I have ever read." Clearly, strong recommendations from well-known authors can be a powerful selling tool, but I'll admit, it was the rest of the cover that sold me on this book. You can't always judge by it, sure, but you can certainly be reeled in by an attractive one. Look at this! Can you feel the energy? It's a small little volume, too, but on paper that's more appealing than the usual mass-market paperback. The crisp white and the stark black and red... Hats off to the art department at Penguin. Something about this small volume called to me and after reading the back cover description, I knew this was going to be good.

The best way that I've found to describe this book is that it feels like you're reading a car chase. In a good way. No, the whole book is not a car chase (though there is a car chase at one point), but it's a fantastic thriller that had me riveted as it raced through twists and turns in the plot, which featured poets, anarchy, and the question of what makes reality.

G.K. Chesterton published this book in 1908 and it opens on the meeting of two poets in turn of the century London -- Lucian Gregory and Gabriel Syme. Gregory loses his temper when Syme suggests that Gregory is not a true anarchist. So to prove his commitment to anarchy, Gregory extracts a vow of silence from Syme and then takes him to a secret meeting of anarchists... only to find (after Syme requests a similar promise from Gregory) that Syme is part of a secret anti-anarchy group of Scotland Yard. The two are at an impasse, unable to expose the other, and so Gregory is completely at a loss when Syme gives a rousing speech at the meeting and the secret agent is elected to serve as the local representative (called "Thursday") on the worldwide Central Council of Anarchists. And this is only the beginning as Syme joins the Council and meets its president, Sunday, who comes to represent all that Syme is battling against in this world.

Wikipedia will tell you that Adam Gopnik ran a piece in The New Yorker which described this book as "one of the hidden hinges of twentieth-century writing, the place where, before our eyes, the nonsense-fantastical tradition of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear pivots and becomes the nightmare-fantastical tradition of Kafka and Borges." Even 101 years later, I could feel that this was that missing literary link that finally made me understand how the jump to writing and appreciating Kafka's work was made possible. That tradition of literature was never my focus, and I feel that had I been asked to read this before Kafka in school, I could have found a more coherent place for it in the sequence of literary styles. I had always been dissatisfied with explanations of how Kafka brought forth such a surreal narrative, fully-formed in its own unique style, a man suddenly made insect. I knew there must have been some premonitory clue, and here I feel as though I've stumbled upon something that makes that a little clearer. Though it seems amusing to use the term "clarity" here, as the simultaneous trust in and distrust of reality is what makes it all terrifying/fascinating.

Oh, and it might be narcissistic, but I'm always going to have a small affinity for a book that treats redheads with respect. There's a fantastic line that you can bet I'll remember: "My red hair, like red flames, shall burn up the world." Awesome. And I'll leave you with an early paragraph where Syme is speaking with Gregory's sister that I particularly enjoyed:

He stared and talked at the girl's red hair and amused face for what seemed to be a few minutes; and then, feeling that the groups in such a place should mix, rose to his feet. To his astonishment, he discovered the whole garden empty. Everyone had gone long ago, and he went himself with a rather hurried apology. He left with a sense of champagne in his head, which he could not afterwards explain. In the wild events which were to follow, this girl had no part at all; he never saw her again until all his tale was over. And yet, in some indescribable way, she kept recurring like a motive in music through all his mad adventures afterwards, and the glory of her strange hair ran like a red thread through those dark and ill-drawn tapestries of the night. For what followed was so improbable that it might well have been a dream. ( )
  alana_leigh | Sep 21, 2009 |
Read at Project Gutenberg. I do believe this is one of the weirdest stories I have ever encountered. ( )
1 vote meggyweg | Sep 20, 2009 |
i was able to download this audiobook through itunes and it was pretty interesting. It was my first time reading, rather listening to such an intense and off the subject book. If came to me as a surprise. I had a difficult time understanding a few things, but i was able to finish the book without hesitation, so i would say its a good one... ( )
  kinisunny | Aug 30, 2009 |
I've never read anything by Chesterton, but I found his caricature of anarchists circa 1900 to be amusing. He seemed to me to have somewhat of a negative view of anarchists, typical of the bomb-throwing nihilist stereotype that originated during that time. The wikipedia entry seems to indicate that the anarchism in the book was primarily a metaphor for a rebellion against God. That is more than likely the intention from what I know of Chesterton's other work.I found the writing to be unusually entertaining, which may indicate that I am starved for masterful literary works, but I suspect that Chesterton is an exceptional writer by any standard. ( )
1 vote dylan1 | Aug 12, 2009 |
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Series (with order)
Canonical Title
Original publication date
People/Characters
Important places
Important events
Awards and honors
Epigraph
Dedication
To Edmund Clerihew Bentley
First words
The suburb of Saffron Park lay on the sunset side of London, as red and ragged as a cloud of sunset.
Quotations
Last words
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
Disambiguation notice
Publisher's editors
Blurbers
Canonical titleThe Man Who Was Thursday
Original publication date1908
People/CharactersThursday, Sunday, Wednesday, Monday, Tuesday, Saturday (show all 16)
Important placesLondon, England, UK, Saffron Park, Scotland Yard, London, England, UK, Calais, France, Paris, France
Awards and honorsGuardian 1000 (Science Fiction & Fantasy), Rough Guide to Crime Fiction (3)
DedicationTo Edmund Clerihew Bentley
First wordsThe suburb of Saffron Park lay on the sunset side of London, as red and ragged as a cloud of sunset.
Last words(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
Book description

Amazon.com (ISBN 0375757910, Paperback)

In an article published the day before his death, G.K. Chesterton called The Man Who Was Thursday "a very melodramatic sort of moonshine." Set in a phantasmagoric London where policemen are poets and anarchists camouflage themselves as, well, anarchists, his 1907 novel offers up one highly colored enigma after another. If that weren't enough, the author also throws in an elephant chase and a hot-air-balloon pursuit in which the pursuers suffer from "the persistent refusal of the balloon to follow the roads, and the still more persistent refusal of the cabmen to follow the balloon."

But Chesterton is also concerned with more serious questions of honor and truth (and less serious ones, perhaps, of duels and dualism). Our hero is Gabriel Syme, a policeman who cannot reveal that his fellow poet Lucian Gregory is an anarchist. In Chesterton's agile, antic hands, Syme is the virtual embodiment of paradox:

He came of a family of cranks, in which all the oldest people had all the newest notions. One of his uncles always walked about without a hat, and another had made an unsuccessful attempt to walk about with a hat and nothing else. His father cultivated art and self-realization; his mother went in for simplicity and hygiene. Hence the child, during his tenderer years, was wholly unacquainted with any drink between the extremes of absinthe and cocoa, of both of which he had a healthy dislike.... Being surrounded with every conceivable kind of revolt from infancy, Gabriel had to revolt into something, so he revolted into the only thing left--sanity.
Elected undercover into the Central European Council of anarchists, Syme must avoid discovery and save the world from any bombings in the offing. As Thursday (each anarchist takes the name of a weekday--the only quotidian thing about this fantasia) does his best to undo his new colleagues, the masks multiply. The question then becomes: Do they reveal or conceal? And who, not to mention what, can be believed? As The Man Who Was Thursday proceeds, it becomes a hilarious numbers game with a more serious undertone--what happens if most members of the council actually turn out to be on the side of right? Chesterton's tour de force is a thriller that is best read slowly, so as to savor his highly anarchic take on anarchy. --Kerry Fried

(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:24 -0400)

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