Parson discovers and reads P. G. Wodehouse

Like @tinkerdan I was thinking of parallels with Mark Twain. I was suckled and weaned on the family collection of 22 volumes of the Complete Mark Twain.
The popular YA adventures are all well and good; but the comic genius of the author is best displayed in the collections of "sketches," brief Tall Tales and absurd situations, written for newspapers; collected in Sketches, New and Old; and More Sketches, New and Old.

Each Twain and Wodehouse display a profound love and delight in the nuances and absurdities in the English language and a genius in misusing words to comic effect.

Which reminds me that I am way overdue for a re-read of Innocents Abroad and Roughing It.


And, in a side note, for trivia buffs, there are two sequels to Tom Sawyer; of which few are aware.

In Tom Sawyer Abroad, Tom and Huck ascend in a tethered ballon at a state fair. The tether fails and the boys are blown across the Atlantic and have some adventures in Africa. Which volume made as little impression on me as it did with the general public, apparently. Tom Sawyer, Detective even less so. I remember no details whatsoever.
 
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Parson said:
... does anyone live that way? Did anyone ever live that way?
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No, of course not. But I feel you're rather missing something if you're going into a Wodehouse looking for verisimilitude. Wodehouse was possibly the greatest English prose stylist of the 20th century, and certainly the most adroit at capturing a certain kind of 'British' humour. The joy for me, and I suspect for many, in reading Wodehouse lies in the absurdity and clear escape from real life that he conjures in his (frankly) ridiculous and byzantine plots.

But you gave him a good go, so no foul there, and he can't be for everyone I guess.

(I'm reminded you didn't care for Lonesome Dove, either Parson - my favourite book of all - so we appear to have widely divergent views on books and what's worth reading! You should probably avoid all future recommendations from me :))
 
I am actually not surprised, Parson I did think that some of the characters would play on your last nerve. They are few of them people we would put up with if we knew them in real life.

And unlike some of us you are not a prose junkie, so the witty narration and the clever dialogue doesn't hit you the same way it does someone like me or Bick or some of the rest. But you have many other very fine qualities, so we won't hold this against you.
 
There are a number of books where I've wanted to slap the characters very hard for being so wet/stupid/whatever or for tolerating other characters who are wet/stupid/whatever. Yet even though Wodehouse's people are so completely unreal and often wet and stupid I never get that feeling about them, perhaps because they are unreal -- they're cartoon characters in prose form.

I think I must approach them as I do the daft Romans in the Asterix books -- they're utterly unlike their historical counterparts but have just enough traits of real humanity -- venality, stupidity -- to strike a chord, and the writing (in translation, at least, for the Asterix) is wonderful. I'd no more decry Bertie and his chums for their folly than I'd criticise Andy Capp for his laziness and misogyny! Plus I find something loveable in Bertie, if only his irrepressible good nature and his willingness to help. (Though in real life I'd be Aunt Agatha and constantly on his case!)
 
Bertie has an iron core when it comes to doing the right thing by women. If a female needs help, Bertie has to give it. It always lands him in trouble. Sometimes a bit of coercion is required, as when Aunt Dahlia must threaten to deny him further access to her chef Anatole's culinary artistry.

If a girl thinks she's doing him a favour by saying she will marry him, even if it's the last thing he wants, it puts him in a position where he must become engaged to her.

It's the unbreakable 'code of the Woosters' and then it's up to Jeeves to devise an escape that leaves her honour intact -- regardless Bertie takes a dent.
 
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Teresa Edgerton said:
And unlike some of us you are not a prose junkie, so the witty narration and the clever dialogue doesn't hit you the same way it does someone like me or Bick or some of the rest. But you have many other very fine qualities, so we won't hold this against you.
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Unfortunately that's truer than I'd like. As to my other "fine qualities" they are more than offset by my sins and flaws, but I thank you so much for taking the time to see them.
Alex The G and T said:
Selah
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Ah, a Biblical reference that I picked up on the first go round. :ROFLMAO:
Bick said:
(I'm reminded you didn't care for Lonesome Dove, either Parson - my favourite book of all - so we appear to have widely divergent views on books and what's worth reading! You should probably avoid all future recommendations from me :))
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I'd guess you are right Bick. But that won't stop me from considering anything you recommend. There would seem to be very slight intersection between P.G. Wodehouse and Lonesome Dove, so I'm not sure if either of those informs the other. Accept that I seem to get frustrated with stories that do not ring true for me. (Now that seems a strange truth from a dedicated S.F. reader. Doesn't it?)
 
RJM Corbet said:
Wodehouse is not sacrilegious -- not at all, imo
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I didn't see any of that. But what I did see was nothing that looked like a nod, humorous or otherwise, to biblical usage of dialogue that did not seem completely in character for someone writing in the early 20th century.
 
Parson said:
like. As to my other "fine qualities" . . . I thank you so much for taking the time to see them.
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Takes no time at all. They are very easy to see.

I am always cautious about recommending books to my friends, even my very best friends with whom I share so many interests, so many thoughts and ideas, because our taste in books is not always among those things we share. Even with someone like Carolyn, with whom there is a large overlap of favorite books and authors, there is also a huge territory (when one is a voracious reader, any significant portion of what one likes is going to be fairly vast) where we are very far apart in which books and what kind we like.

Even when people love some of the same books, it is often for very different reasons, so a shared love of one author's books may not translate at all to a shared enjoyment of other authors, who have what the one reader loved but not what the other did.

I wish you could like these books, since they have given me great joy over the years, and I would like you, as with any of my friends, to experience that same joy, and to be able to discuss it together. But it was not to be.
 
Parson said:
I didn't see any of that. But what I did see was nothing that looked like a nod, humorous or otherwise, to biblical usage of dialogue that did not seem completely in character for someone writing in the early 20th century.
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I think that British men of his class and era learned a lot of scripture as part of their education. You might be surprised. Remember, unlike us, they had a state religion, which therefore had much to do with what was taught in the schools, especially boys' schools, where it was presumed that a certain amount of them were training for the clergy. Also, a lot of the teachers were clergymen, since teaching boys was a job that clergymen without a parish could take.
 
Parson said:
I didn't see any of that. But what I did see was nothing that looked like a nod, humorous or otherwise, to biblical usage of dialogue that did not seem completely in character for someone writing in the early 20th century.
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I can't quite get my head around that double negative!
 
Okay, what I was trying to say was that any biblical allusion I found in Wodehouse dialogue seemed totally in character with what an educated man in the early part of the 20th century would say. --- Now that does not mean that some of it was not supposed to elicit humor, just that I didn't find it unusual and therefore did not find it funny. --- And it may also speak to the fact that Wodehouse was writing so well that I missed the intended laugh line.
 
Sometimes things are funny because they are familiar or in character or typical. Or sometimes it is the twist that is put on the familiar. Or the exaggeration, like comparing a disagreeable old aunt to a Biblical plague.

But explaining humor is kind of beside the point, as we all know. If something isn't funny to someone, telling them why it is funny to us doesn't usually help. Quite the contrary, most of the time.
 
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