Where It Got Weird

Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Some people think (or thought, over the last several hundreds of years) that this is a very funny book. And entertaining in an over-the-top, no-holds-barred kind of way. And they're welcome to that opinion. I didn't warm up to it much.

I found some things to like in this, and certain goals and ideas of my own kept me reading it to the end, but I read it in an amateur anthropologist way, not as a genuine reader, and in that role I found it mildly entertaining. On its own, as a book to while away the hours, this is mostly really... no fun.

That's why 2 stars.

Also, the casual misogyny (though likely normal for the period) gets old. More than half of the book (books, technically) is about Panurge wanting to maybe get married, but because he's certain that whoever he chooses will sleep around on him he goes to all kind of lengths to get advice. Some of that is funny; some is entertaining in a Gulliver's Travels sort of way; but much of it is just "ha ha women are terrible let's eat and drink and fart." Except he usually uses phrases like rogering a wench with his enormous tool, which is funny for its rudeness while being disturbing for its tone, for its disregard for the humanity of the unnamed women he's talking about.

Sure, his crudeness is kinda funny. So much shitting. So much farting. So many sex jokes. It's crazy. A quick flip through the book will show you two or three examples, no problem. It's all through the book. It was plenty. And juxtaposing that crudeness with his undeniable erudition is comic, just on the face of it, but it's not enough to carry the book.

However, this book had a point, or many, and in the places where Rabelais's satire is at least somewhat comprehensible to a non-Catholic non-French non-16th-Century-reader, it's more fun and more meaningful. He goes after the corruption of many of the institutions of the time, telling absurd stories that make some category of people look foolish. When he's mocking the pope or lawyers or astrologers or city leaders, for example, it still make sense even in 2023, and the poop and fart jokes are extra explosive (a joke he would totally make). That kind of satire works for me, a casual reader. But he loses me when he's attacking jobs or groups of people or institutions that no longer exist in any form I recognize, and that's a big chunk of the book. It's not his fault the world changed, but it's not the readers' fault, either. Just bad luck.

More narrowly, I didn't enjoy his style of lampooning. He'd make a point by exaggerating the number of something, but in a really goofy way, beyond extreme, like saying millions where dozens would have been a lot and thousands ridiculous. Think absurd and multiply it by Babe the Blue Ox. Pantagruel the giant is sometimes small enough to sit at a table with everyone, but in one section he's huge enough that Panurge travels across his tongue into his mouth where there are whole cities between his teeth. It's like Paul Bunyan tall tales except filled with--filled. FILLED--with classical references. (If erudition got stars, he'd have 20/5 from me. It doesn't.) Sometimes he had characters spouting learned examples from mythology and the classics to show that they were annoying, but sometimes I feel like he just couldn't help himself and he had to name half a dozen figures from antiquity who experienced a similar thing.

Or so it seemed to me.

Anyway, I read this for my own reasons and I'm happy enough with what I discovered here. My curiosity is satisfied. Glad to put it away now.

View all my reviews