Francois Rabelais
Gargantua and Pantagruel
A beast of a book that is mainly about the exploits of a giant and his son written in 1500’s. The style is quite hard to read, despite a very good translation, as many of the people and places and customs listed are alien and so we don’t get the fully brunt of many of the attacks, or agreements. However it’s an interesting read especially the bawdy bits that are surprisingly frank, I guess from that time to this many people in Europe have become a lot more inhibited. The humour is childish at times and there are too many lists of things that don’t mean a lot to me and were probably only tolerable 500 years ago as entertainment was limited and stories the main one. Having got through the Pantagruel book and ploughing through Gargantua I thought life's too short to read the same farcical and juvenile exploits of a giant which obviously had a cutting social commentary half a millennium ago but means little now. So I stopped..
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