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3.52 AVERAGE
3.52 AVERAGE
funny
informative
lighthearted
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
funny
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
funny
Surprisingly endearing, nothinig happens really to this person at all but its just charming and amusing, really lovely actually. Not sure it would have ensdured had it been much longer but it was a good read for my daily commute (audio)
[18th book of 2021. Artist for this review is Weedon Grossmith, who illustrates the novel.]
3.5. This seems like a fairly suitable read for the point I’m at now, lifting the restraints I put on myself early this year regarding reading, mostly ensuring that I read novels from 1800-1930. I’ve read a lot of Victorian fiction this year, more than I would normally. The Diary of a Nobody is a comic novel, a satire of the 19th century, first published in 1892. People usually talk about a “biting satire” and though this bites, it bites the playfulness of a puppy; it is good-natured, it laughs at itself as well as the century it is coming from. In a way, it reads like a novel ahead of its time.
The humour is fairly mild but the novel appears to know it’s mild—I feel like the Grossmith brothers were laughing at Pooter [the narrator] as much as the reader is supposed to. There were some humorous parts, and many puns. My close friends will know the fastest way to lose my respect is to begin punning around me. Some incidents brought a smile to my face. There is one scene where Pooter makes some remark about a woman’s portrait on the wall and the man says that it is his wife’s sister, painted after death. Pooter attempts to save the awkwardness by remarking of a gentleman’s portrait, “Who is this jovial looking gentleman? Life doesn’t seem to trouble him much”, to which the man says, “No, it doesn’t. He is dead too—my brother.
The humour, whether it is truly funny or not, drives this piece. It is an epistolary novel, portrayed through Pooter’s diaries. Pooter is actually quite a great character (though his charm, and indeed the charm of the whole novel wears thin a little before the end), he believes he is remarkably funny, intelligent and witty. He often, before quoting things he has said throughout the day, reports how quick he was, or how clever he is. Of course, we laugh at him and pity him. I won’t quote any of the jokes, they aren’t brilliantly funny enough to survive their punchlines being ruined.
My rating is purely personal, then. It is a light, satirical little novel about middle-class England and I am glad to have read it. I only wanted more. It is mostly plotless, made from sketches more than anything, and never reaches a deeper or more philosophical level than its face value. Having said that, it is the portrait of an “ordinary” life and Pooter is a “nobody”, another human being bumbling through life as best as they can. We used do an exercise with books we were studying to find the “emotional core”, if we could find the whole core of the novel distilled into just a few lines. I think I found it when Pooter writes this: I always feel people are happier who live a simple unsophisticated life. I believe I am happy because I am not ambitious. I don’t necessarily disagree with Pooter on this point.
3.5. This seems like a fairly suitable read for the point I’m at now, lifting the restraints I put on myself early this year regarding reading, mostly ensuring that I read novels from 1800-1930. I’ve read a lot of Victorian fiction this year, more than I would normally. The Diary of a Nobody is a comic novel, a satire of the 19th century, first published in 1892. People usually talk about a “biting satire” and though this bites, it bites the playfulness of a puppy; it is good-natured, it laughs at itself as well as the century it is coming from. In a way, it reads like a novel ahead of its time.
The humour is fairly mild but the novel appears to know it’s mild—I feel like the Grossmith brothers were laughing at Pooter [the narrator] as much as the reader is supposed to. There were some humorous parts, and many puns. My close friends will know the fastest way to lose my respect is to begin punning around me. Some incidents brought a smile to my face. There is one scene where Pooter makes some remark about a woman’s portrait on the wall and the man says that it is his wife’s sister, painted after death. Pooter attempts to save the awkwardness by remarking of a gentleman’s portrait, “Who is this jovial looking gentleman? Life doesn’t seem to trouble him much”, to which the man says, “No, it doesn’t. He is dead too—my brother.
The humour, whether it is truly funny or not, drives this piece. It is an epistolary novel, portrayed through Pooter’s diaries. Pooter is actually quite a great character (though his charm, and indeed the charm of the whole novel wears thin a little before the end), he believes he is remarkably funny, intelligent and witty. He often, before quoting things he has said throughout the day, reports how quick he was, or how clever he is. Of course, we laugh at him and pity him. I won’t quote any of the jokes, they aren’t brilliantly funny enough to survive their punchlines being ruined.
My rating is purely personal, then. It is a light, satirical little novel about middle-class England and I am glad to have read it. I only wanted more. It is mostly plotless, made from sketches more than anything, and never reaches a deeper or more philosophical level than its face value. Having said that, it is the portrait of an “ordinary” life and Pooter is a “nobody”, another human being bumbling through life as best as they can. We used do an exercise with books we were studying to find the “emotional core”, if we could find the whole core of the novel distilled into just a few lines. I think I found it when Pooter writes this: I always feel people are happier who live a simple unsophisticated life. I believe I am happy because I am not ambitious. I don’t necessarily disagree with Pooter on this point.
funny
Mr. Pooter made me laugh, even with the dad jokes/puns of which he was so fond.
Excellent comedy, although it took a few chapters to get going, at least for me. I had just tried to read Cocksure by Mordecai Richler, a novelist whose later work I adore, but it seemed too crude and obvious a satire to be very interesting, so I put it away after a chapter or two. With the Diary, the opposite threatened to happen: not much seemed to be going on in the first diary entries of this 'nobody', Mr Pooter, and I didn't quite see where the humour came in. But it takes a while for the cumulative effect of his clumsiness and self-delusion to catch on, and then it becomes very funny.
It is quite simply classic comedy about class anxiety among the petit-bourgeois (or the lower middle class, as they're called in England). Stylistically it's not spectacular (Grossmith is no Wodehouse), although some of the comedy is linguistic, especially Pooter's penchant for thinking up the most atrocious puns:
But most of the humour is situational. Because of this, more than of any other novel it reminds me of classic television sitcoms like One Foot in the Grave, Keeping Up Appearances, the (admittedly rather inspid) My Family or the splendid Canadian animated series Bob and Margaret. Widely divergent as these series may seem, they share certain basic characteristics – and so does this book.
Actually, it's quite a feat that the authors make the comedy work in this novel, since the entire story is told in the words of the protagonist who is also the butt of most of the jokes. In order for this, every time he slips over a banana peel he'll have to record it in his diary for us to laugh about it. As he faithfully does...
With comedy like this, you risk missing out on some of the topical references and other contextual knowledge that would have been readily apparent to contemporary readers but not to us. I read this in one of the free epub versions available on the internet, but because I was afraid I was missing out on some of the jokes I also considered buying an ebook of the Penguin or OUP edition, which I expect to have good introductions and annotations. I sometimes worry that in the long run the online availability of free and fairly good text versions of the classics (on Gutenberg, Feedbooks &c) will undermine the market for good scholarly or semi-scholarly editions of those same classics. (I wouldn't have wanted to miss Tony Tanner's brilliant introductions to Jane Austen's novels or W.J. Harvey's to those of George Eliot!)
But I found this online edition of the text of Diary of a Nobody with annotations that seem quite dependable, and certainly offer a wealth of contextual information. Admirable work by Peter Morton. Unfortunately, it's not available as an epub and the annotations to the text are not hyperlinked. But for a short text like this, it will do.
So maybe my worry about the commercial viability of annotated editions is unwarranted. Maybe online editions, free or not, will provide for this need – and in some cases do it even better than commercial publishers can. After all, as Morton himself notes: 'Flint [in the OUP edition] explains a few of the contemporary allusions in her introduction, but her edition has no notes on the text at all. (...) Glinert [in the Penguin edition] has notes on the text, and is good on topography of suburban London and the Grossmiths’ theatrical careers and references, but his grasp on late-Victorian literary culture is much weaker than Flint’s, and his notes are silent on many points that are explained in the present annotated edition.'
It is quite simply classic comedy about class anxiety among the petit-bourgeois (or the lower middle class, as they're called in England). Stylistically it's not spectacular (Grossmith is no Wodehouse), although some of the comedy is linguistic, especially Pooter's penchant for thinking up the most atrocious puns:
Carrie brought down some of my shirts and advised me to take them to Trillip's round the corner. She said: "The fronts and cuffs are much frayed." I said without a moment's hesitation: "I'm 'frayed they are." Lor! how we roared. I thought we should never stop laughing.
But most of the humour is situational. Because of this, more than of any other novel it reminds me of classic television sitcoms like One Foot in the Grave, Keeping Up Appearances, the (admittedly rather inspid) My Family or the splendid Canadian animated series Bob and Margaret. Widely divergent as these series may seem, they share certain basic characteristics – and so does this book.
Actually, it's quite a feat that the authors make the comedy work in this novel, since the entire story is told in the words of the protagonist who is also the butt of most of the jokes. In order for this, every time he slips over a banana peel he'll have to record it in his diary for us to laugh about it. As he faithfully does...
With comedy like this, you risk missing out on some of the topical references and other contextual knowledge that would have been readily apparent to contemporary readers but not to us. I read this in one of the free epub versions available on the internet, but because I was afraid I was missing out on some of the jokes I also considered buying an ebook of the Penguin or OUP edition, which I expect to have good introductions and annotations. I sometimes worry that in the long run the online availability of free and fairly good text versions of the classics (on Gutenberg, Feedbooks &c) will undermine the market for good scholarly or semi-scholarly editions of those same classics. (I wouldn't have wanted to miss Tony Tanner's brilliant introductions to Jane Austen's novels or W.J. Harvey's to those of George Eliot!)
But I found this online edition of the text of Diary of a Nobody with annotations that seem quite dependable, and certainly offer a wealth of contextual information. Admirable work by Peter Morton. Unfortunately, it's not available as an epub and the annotations to the text are not hyperlinked. But for a short text like this, it will do.
So maybe my worry about the commercial viability of annotated editions is unwarranted. Maybe online editions, free or not, will provide for this need – and in some cases do it even better than commercial publishers can. After all, as Morton himself notes: 'Flint [in the OUP edition] explains a few of the contemporary allusions in her introduction, but her edition has no notes on the text at all. (...) Glinert [in the Penguin edition] has notes on the text, and is good on topography of suburban London and the Grossmiths’ theatrical careers and references, but his grasp on late-Victorian literary culture is much weaker than Flint’s, and his notes are silent on many points that are explained in the present annotated edition.'