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4.0 AVERAGE
4.0 AVERAGE
This is one of the stories that had great impact on me, almost giving me existential crisis, if it wasn't verging on nihilism a little. It certainly made me sit down and think for a while.
This is one of the few books that changed my view of humanity and life itself, made me question the role we all have in the world and how little we actually are in comparison to the history of man. It is undoubtedly pessimistic, satirical, and atheistic in nature, very philosophical and a tiny bit incoherent due to Mark Twain's death, but ultimately a great read.
3 stars to a masterpiece that could have been...if it was meant to be published in the first place.
reflective
fast-paced
Good, fun curmudgeonly bitterness, but not particularly subtle.
I hate reading books looking for the meaning. That may be the reason I sometimes avoid some of the classics. I knew what I was getting into with this book though- most of the message was pretty obvious. Entertaining but not one that will mean something deeper to my life!
Wonderful! I read it a few years back, accidentally and discovered a whole new Twain. I am now lookig forward to listen to the audiobook, from LibriVox.
For a man best known for following the written adventures of feckless children, the biggest mystery of this strange book is that it reads more like the manuscript of a mass murderer. Here is where our boy Samuel Clemens, by now deep in the shitter financially and still mourning the loss of his daughter, expressed his observations of a darkening world through the eponymous Mysterious Stranger himself, Satan.
Though coming off handsome, intelligent, and powerfully charismatic, Satan nefariously toys with the poor people of Eseldorf, Austria through a proxy: children. The children themselves make for a fitting vehicle for Satan to romp around with, and he terrorizes the community by way of the boys' ignorance. To add insult to injury, Satan regularly dumps on what he calls humanity's Moral Sense, which he argues distinguishes us from animals negatively ("No brute ever does a cruel thing—that is the monopoly of those with the Moral Sense. When a brute inflicts pain he does it innocently; it is not wrong; for him there is no such thing as wrong. And he does not inflict pain for the pleasure of inflicting it—only man does that."), inviting questions over what it means to be moral in a world that overwhelmingly knows not the distinction between right and wrong.
This book often struck me as a thinly veiled attempt to take Clemens' personal philosophies at the time and place them in a literary wrapper. As such, it doesn't do for effective storytelling, but it does present some arduously interesting ideas. The story itself is anchored by Satan's condemnatory monologues on what it means to be human whilst thumbing his nose at God. I frequently found myself frightened by how pointed these observations were as they mirrored much of my internal thought processes when I was dealing with the loss of my own mother, making this book probably one the most depressing cases for atheism ever made.
Bleak, unsympathetic, and irreverently pessimistic, this book is a black mark on the psyche. I can't say I particularly enjoyed it, but it set my mind off for sure.
Though coming off handsome, intelligent, and powerfully charismatic, Satan nefariously toys with the poor people of Eseldorf, Austria through a proxy: children. The children themselves make for a fitting vehicle for Satan to romp around with, and he terrorizes the community by way of the boys' ignorance. To add insult to injury, Satan regularly dumps on what he calls humanity's Moral Sense, which he argues distinguishes us from animals negatively ("No brute ever does a cruel thing—that is the monopoly of those with the Moral Sense. When a brute inflicts pain he does it innocently; it is not wrong; for him there is no such thing as wrong. And he does not inflict pain for the pleasure of inflicting it—only man does that."), inviting questions over what it means to be moral in a world that overwhelmingly knows not the distinction between right and wrong.
This book often struck me as a thinly veiled attempt to take Clemens' personal philosophies at the time and place them in a literary wrapper. As such, it doesn't do for effective storytelling, but it does present some arduously interesting ideas. The story itself is anchored by Satan's condemnatory monologues on what it means to be human whilst thumbing his nose at God. I frequently found myself frightened by how pointed these observations were as they mirrored much of my internal thought processes when I was dealing with the loss of my own mother, making this book probably one the most depressing cases for atheism ever made.
Bleak, unsympathetic, and irreverently pessimistic, this book is a black mark on the psyche. I can't say I particularly enjoyed it, but it set my mind off for sure.
Wonderful! I read it a few years back, accidentally and discovered a whole new Twain. I am now lookig forward to listen to the audiobook, from LibriVox.