A review by jasonfurman
The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio

5.0

Years ago I read and loved the first 20 or so stories in The Decamaron. I have been meaning to read it all ever since and was excited about the great reviews of the Wayne Rebhorn translation a few years ago. In January I decided I would read it over the summer, little realizing just how relevant the timing would be. Originally I planned to read a story a day but I found that I got into them and wanted to read 5 or 10 at once but then need a break of several days or weeks. It ended up taking me 113 days—which is 13 days more than there are stories and 103 days more than the frame tale itself is supposed to take.

And I loved it. Almost every tale was a marvel and collectively they are something even more marvelous. It is amazing that one person composed this nearly 700 years ago, even if he was drawing on other stories. The stories are funny, surprising, shocking, filled with sex and violence, have a consistent morality to them but almost no moralizing, and work together in a nice rhythm. In general I love frame tales and tales within tales like the Arabian Nights and even have the unfashionable opinion of loving the interpolated tales in Don Quixote Part One. This is a spectacular set of them that I will certainly return to in the future, hopefully not waiting for the next pandemic.