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4.08 AVERAGE
4.08 AVERAGE
Another great cock and bull story, much like Tristram Shandy. Really really REALLY good writing, attached to so much sexual deviance. A really good reflection of Tristram Shandy. Glad I read both of these this year.
Stopped reading after 10%, because the story goes too slow and the old English speech was too hard to follow.
Where to begin describing—let alone commenting on—this postmodern take on the 18th-century farce novel. It is, on its surface, an old-fashioned tale of an overeducated young man's travels and lessons in how the real world works, reminiscent of Voltaire's 'Candide' and, more recently, Toole's 'A Confederacy of Dunces'.
While the language, the plotting, and the characters fit this style quite well, this is clearly a modern novel; it winks at the reader throughout and it plays with form in unexpected ways. Don't be surprised when a simple argument between two prostitutes turns into a six-page list of insults, real and made up, in English and French.
The humor here is juvenile, as base as the lewdest of Shakespeare, and lewder. The plotting is outrageously artificial, full of convenient turns and coincidences and revelations. The characters are fluid, changing their motives, reactions, and even appearances every which way. This all fits the book's implied "age", but it's also thoroughly enjoyable to read.
Between all the gross-out jokes about breeches and members, there's a lot of clever (and even touching) insight into the human condition here. And on top of it, while Barth clearly wrote The Sot-Weed Factor as a tour-de-force exercise in jamming into a novel literally anything and everything he could possibly think of, he didn't forget to make each page fun to read.
While the language, the plotting, and the characters fit this style quite well, this is clearly a modern novel; it winks at the reader throughout and it plays with form in unexpected ways. Don't be surprised when a simple argument between two prostitutes turns into a six-page list of insults, real and made up, in English and French.
The humor here is juvenile, as base as the lewdest of Shakespeare, and lewder. The plotting is outrageously artificial, full of convenient turns and coincidences and revelations. The characters are fluid, changing their motives, reactions, and even appearances every which way. This all fits the book's implied "age", but it's also thoroughly enjoyable to read.
Between all the gross-out jokes about breeches and members, there's a lot of clever (and even touching) insight into the human condition here. And on top of it, while Barth clearly wrote The Sot-Weed Factor as a tour-de-force exercise in jamming into a novel literally anything and everything he could possibly think of, he didn't forget to make each page fun to read.
Finished in mid-2013. A pale imitation of a Henry Fielding novel. The plot is byzantium and sometimes fascinating, but I'd rather spend time with the characters in Tom Jones, who live off the page in a way that Barth's creations do not. Guess I prefer substance over style.
Well-loved books from my past
Rating: 5 golden stars of five, with a rapturous yodel cluster
The Publisher Says: 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!
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!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Rating: 5 golden stars of five, with a rapturous yodel cluster
The Publisher Says: 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!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
I cannot remember where I heard of this book or how my high expectations of it came to be, and I had no recollection of me ever having any idea whatsoever about what it contained. When I first laid eyes on the cover of my edition that had been withdrawn from the stock from Southhampton Institute's Mountbatten Library without any stamp to prove that anyone had ever borrowed it, I had some serious doubts as to whether I would ever finish it.
But so here we have a virgin poet in a world of rape and malice. To read another story about a young man who decides to be a pure poet struggling to make it in a depraved world did not seem like anything I would feel up for and I the first hundred or so-pages there were serious doubts about whether I had accidentally gotten the name of the book or the author mixed up. I found myself reading some kind of smut with all kinds of perversions enclosed and I was quite confused as to how I was supposed to tackle it. My social conscience kept telling me that I should put it down, that nothing good could come of it as it seemed only to contain John Barth's lurid fantasies, but my literary conscience told me to keep reading and not be so quick to judge. One quote from Sunday Times helped my keeping on as it told the reader to trust nothing in this tome, that nothing but the fact of what a sot-weed factor is (the manager of a tobacco plantation) was what it appeared to be. And as the story started to unfold and I noticed the first incongruities in the reports of events unfolding around Ebenezer, it was getting harder and harder to put the book down. I am a sucker for anything meta, and find that these days, I tend to enjoy being led around in circles by an author smarter than me.
I keep asking myself some questions that makes me feel as dumbfounded as Ebenezer himself. Who is this book really for? Is it supposed to make people feel uncomfortable or am I just way too much of a prude to even be thinking in this way? As literary work it should stand on its own – forever disconnected from time and space – even though it contains all manners of misogynistic and misanthropic sentiment. On the other hand, this is still just a book. Life has been horrible, and still is, to so many so what difference does it make to tell a story about it. Is it the way in which it is told that got me sometime? That appalling acts like rape, racism and murder almost seemed justified at times? But, did they really though, or had that something to do with my interpretation? What does it even matter that I have read it or that I am trying to review it in some way? Am I simply trying to justify my reading of this racy and bawdy book? To be honest, I do not even know anymore since all this running around in circles, going back and forth over yonder Maryland has got me quite confused. And that counts for a lot in a world where everything is so simple and straightforward that you understand that it cannot simply be so but ignore that thought altogether.
So now, it seems that I have written this review in which I have said nothing about what I actually thought about the book. I would like to say that I hoped this would be like Ebenezers poetry: that I could just write it and in the end it would make sense. But that would be a cop out so for once I am actually going to take my head out of the sand and state that I liked it because it had characters like Joan, Mary and Anna. Plus, Ebenezer kind of redeems himself in the end when he questions his belief of the world and realizes that it might actually be a pretty horrible place: "did the "real" John Coode exist at all independently of his several impersonators, or was he merely a fiction created by his supposed collaborators for the purpose of shedding their responsibilities, just as businessmen incorporate limited-liability companies to answer for their adventures?"
Nothing is as it seems.
But so here we have a virgin poet in a world of rape and malice. To read another story about a young man who decides to be a pure poet struggling to make it in a depraved world did not seem like anything I would feel up for and I the first hundred or so-pages there were serious doubts about whether I had accidentally gotten the name of the book or the author mixed up. I found myself reading some kind of smut with all kinds of perversions enclosed and I was quite confused as to how I was supposed to tackle it. My social conscience kept telling me that I should put it down, that nothing good could come of it as it seemed only to contain John Barth's lurid fantasies, but my literary conscience told me to keep reading and not be so quick to judge. One quote from Sunday Times helped my keeping on as it told the reader to trust nothing in this tome, that nothing but the fact of what a sot-weed factor is (the manager of a tobacco plantation) was what it appeared to be. And as the story started to unfold and I noticed the first incongruities in the reports of events unfolding around Ebenezer, it was getting harder and harder to put the book down. I am a sucker for anything meta, and find that these days, I tend to enjoy being led around in circles by an author smarter than me.
I keep asking myself some questions that makes me feel as dumbfounded as Ebenezer himself. Who is this book really for? Is it supposed to make people feel uncomfortable or am I just way too much of a prude to even be thinking in this way? As literary work it should stand on its own – forever disconnected from time and space – even though it contains all manners of misogynistic and misanthropic sentiment. On the other hand, this is still just a book. Life has been horrible, and still is, to so many so what difference does it make to tell a story about it. Is it the way in which it is told that got me sometime? That appalling acts like rape, racism and murder almost seemed justified at times? But, did they really though, or had that something to do with my interpretation? What does it even matter that I have read it or that I am trying to review it in some way? Am I simply trying to justify my reading of this racy and bawdy book? To be honest, I do not even know anymore since all this running around in circles, going back and forth over yonder Maryland has got me quite confused. And that counts for a lot in a world where everything is so simple and straightforward that you understand that it cannot simply be so but ignore that thought altogether.
So now, it seems that I have written this review in which I have said nothing about what I actually thought about the book. I would like to say that I hoped this would be like Ebenezers poetry: that I could just write it and in the end it would make sense. But that would be a cop out so for once I am actually going to take my head out of the sand and state that I liked it because it had characters like Joan, Mary and Anna. Plus, Ebenezer kind of redeems himself in the end when he questions his belief of the world and realizes that it might actually be a pretty horrible place: "did the "real" John Coode exist at all independently of his several impersonators, or was he merely a fiction created by his supposed collaborators for the purpose of shedding their responsibilities, just as businessmen incorporate limited-liability companies to answer for their adventures?"
Nothing is as it seems.