37. Jean-Jacques Rosseau - Julie ou La Nouvelle Héloise (1760)

Review

I keep forgetting to update this... I am already reading Anton Reiser some 14 books after this, but I have to come back. I really should do this more often so the books are fresher in my mind.

In the process I have read about four Rosseau books, this one being the first, and there is something I learned. Rosseau is never as interesting as when talking about himself, which is not the case here.

This books was a phenomenon of huge proportions, huge popularity, particularly among ladies in the late 1700s, but I don't know if it is the translation's fault or something, but it feels particularly dry and actually quite dull. For epistolary romance novels I'd go for Richardson any day. Yes, I'd rather read Clarissa again. But this is the book which made Rosseau the celebrity he became, and so, if only for that it deserves its place in history.

Final Grade

5/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

The novel’s subtitle points to the history of Heloise and Pierre Abélard, a medieval story of passion and Christian renunciation. The novel was put on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

A passage from the book:

36. Samuel Johnsson - The Full History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759)

Review

You might think I've abandoned this but really, I haven't. Even if it's been about a year since my last update... it only means I have 12 books that I need to update but haven't. I promise to try to get up to date here in the next few weeks... particularly because some of these books are slowly fading from memory... specially those which I didn't find particularly interesting as was the case here.

The plot strangely mirrors that of Voltaire's Candide, Rasselas leaves home with a philosopher... Panglo... Imlac and a girl Cune... Nekayah. Only here Nekayah is his sister and not love interest. The travels of Rasselas serve a different purpose than those of Candide, however, and Rasselas seeks the path to happiness only to find that it is not easily achieved and returns home.

Johnsson's style of prose is not particularly attractive and the novel, even if quite short ends up being quite dull as well. Johnsson is a bit too up his own ass to be a good storyteller and in comparison to Voltaire he seems almost reactionary in his ideas. There are none of the fascinating tableaux of Candide, you end up not really caring particularly for any of the characters... it really has not stood the test of time very well, and coming right after a much superior novel in the same style does not help as well. You can't stop comparing Johnsson to Voltaire and he loses in almost every point.

Final Grade

5/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

While the story is thematically similar to Candide by Voltaire — both concern young men traveling in the company of honored teachers, encountering and examining human suffering in an attempt to determine the root of happiness — their root concerns are distinctly different. Voltaire was very directly satirizing the widely-read philosophical work by Gottfried Leibniz, particularly the Theodicee, in which Leibniz asserts that the world, no matter how we may perceive it, is necessarily the "best of all possible worlds", whereas the question Rasselas confronts most directly is whether or not humanity is essentially capable of attaining happiness. Writing as a devout Christian, Johnson makes through his characters no blanket attacks on the viability of a religious response to this question, as Voltaire does, and while the story is in places light and humorous, it is not a piece of satire, as is Candide.

Some Ethiopian Hip-Hop by Rasselas:

35. Voltaire - Candide ou l'Optimisme (Candide) (1759)

Review

Voltaire presents one of the funniest and darkest works on the list up until now. Candide works as a rabid attack on the idea of optimism, this is not, as Pangloss says, "the best of all possible worlds" in fact it is a pretty crappy world.

Near the beginning we fittingly have the earthquake in Lisbon in 1755, one of the great turning points in western thinking, when many European thinkers finally realised the cruelty of nature due to the death and destruction inflicted in one of the principal cities in the continent. This is compounded by the 7 year war, another disgraceful loss of innocent life. In this it bears a remarkable resemblance to Simplicissimus that we have already had here.

This shift in thought has repercussions on the perception of the universe. People now start thinking that this isn't a benevolent God that we all live under, but that we instead live at the mercy of a nature that does not give a shit. How Voltaire manages to transform this into a funny tale is the great merit of this book. One of the earliest and best exercises of schadenfreude, Candide follows the misfortunes of the main character who tries to keep cheery through it all, in a cruel, sadistic but poignant way. A great little book.

Final Grade

9/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

The 1755 Lisbon earthquake, tsunami and resulting fires of All Saints' Day had a strong influence on theologians of the day and on Voltaire, who was himself disillusioned by them. The earthquake had an especially large effect on the contemporary doctrine of optimism, a philosophical system which implies that such events should not occur. Optimism is founded on the theodicy of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz that says all is for the best because God is a benevolent deity. This concept is often put into the form, "all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds" (Fr. "Tout est pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes possibles"). Philosophers had trouble fitting the horrors of this earthquake into the optimist world view.

Voltaire actively rejected Leibnizian optimism after the natural disaster, convinced that if this were the best possible world, it should surely be better than it is. In both Candide and Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne ("Poem on the Lisbon Disaster"), Voltaire attacks this optimist belief. He makes use of the Lisbon earthquake in both Candide and his Poème to argue this point, sarcastically describing the catastrophe as one of the most horrible disasters "in the best of all possible worlds". Immediately after the earthquake, unreliable rumours circulated around Europe, sometimes overestimating the severity of the event. Ira Wade, a noted expert on Voltaire and Candide, has analysed which sources Voltaire might have referenced in learning of the event. Wade speculates that Voltaire's primary source for information on the Lisbon earthquake was the 1755 work Relation historique du Tremblement de Terre survenu à Lisbonne by Ange Goudar.

Bernstein's overture to Candide, his opera based on the book:

34. Charlotte Lennox - The Female Quixote (1752)

Review

As the name states the Female Quixote is a bit like Don Quixote but with a female main character... well it is a bit like it in the sense that it is a story about a character obsessed with romance literature and who presumes to act like the characters in those novels.

The main character Arabella acts aloof, presumes that men are always out to kidnap her, expects gallant knights to save her and dresses in what could only be considered extreme-retro fashion. Of course this leads to inumerous situations where she clashes with the society around her.

It is a good book, but it is much more hung up on its premiss than it should have been. Little else happens. It does not have the scope or the depth of Quixote, but it shows an interesting complementary perspective to that book. Romance novel obsession from a woman's point of view. Like Quixote it is a novel about novels, and that is its best, but derivative point.

Final Grade

6/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Samuel Richardson and Samuel Johnson both reviewed and helped out with Lennox's second and most successful novel, The Female Quixote, or, The Adventures of Arabella, and Henry Fielding praised the novel in his Covent Garden Journal. The Female Quixote was quite popular. It was reprinted and packaged in a series of great novels in 1783, 1799, and 1810. It was translated into German in 1754, French in 1773 and 1801, and Spanish in 1808. The novel formally inverts Don Quixote: as the don mistakes himself for the knightly hero of a Romance, so Arabella mistakes herself for the maiden love of a Romance. While the don thinks it his duty to praise the Platonically pure damsels he meets (such as the prostitute he loves), so Arabella believes it is in her power to kill with a look and it is the duty of her lovers to suffer ordeals on her behalf.

33. Tobias Smollett - The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751)

Review

This coming on the list so soon after Fielding's Tom Jones really does it a great disservice, it reads like a poor and somewhat mean spirited copy of that great work. I do not like Smollett as a person, he feels like a bit of a mean vindictive xenophobic little shit.

The fact that most of this book is set abroad lets Smollett exercise his foreigner-hating muscles, something which would later be taken up by Laurence Sterne in his Sentimental Journey where the character of Smellfungus is a thinly veiled allusion to Smollett.

So about two thirds into the book I quit. None of it was very interesting or funny, although it was desperately trying to be witty. At the moment I am reading another Smollett book, Humphry Clinker, which is much better, and actually quite funny, so I might have to revise my opinion when we get to that review.

Final Grade

5/10 (read only 2/3rds).

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Smollett was born at Dalquhurn, now part of Renton, in present-day West Dunbartonshire, Scotland. He was the son of a judge and land-owner, and was educated at the University of Glasgow, qualifying as a surgeon. His career in medicine came second to his literary ambitions, and in 1739 he went to London to seek his fortune as a dramatist. Although unsuccessful, he obtained a commission as a naval surgeon on the HMS Chichester and travelled to Jamaica, where he settled down for several years. On his return, he set up practice in Downing Street and married a wealthy Jamaican heiress, Anne Lascelles, in 1747.

His first published work was a poem about the Battle of Culloden entitled "The Tears of Scotland", but it was The Adventures of Roderick Random which made his name. It was modelled on Le Sage's Gil Blas, and was published in 1748. Smollett followed it up by finally getting his tragedy, The Regicide, published, though it was never performed. In 1750, Smollett took his MD degree in Aberdeen, and also travelled to France, where he obtained material for his second novel, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, another big success.

No videos, sorry.

32. John Cleland - Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Fanny Hill) (1748)

Review

Fanny Hill is a breath of fresh air. It is not particularly fascinating as a novel, Moll Flanders is a much better book for example, however the depictions of sex acts are really what this novel is all about.

It is clearly a pornographic novel and it is at the more explicit moments that it really shines through as great writing. Another interesting point is the fact that the novel is seen from a woman's perspective, therefore Fanny's descriptions of male nudity invariably focusing on the throbbing member, are quite novel.

Fanny loves sex, she is not really a victim here, she seems to have a calling for prostitution, her endless fascination with the several fetishes of her costumers is a great example of this, however this is another thing that makes the novel so uncommon. The work revels in the pleasures of sex, unlike Richardson's it is not a fate worse than death, unlike Moll Flanders it isn't a means to an end, in Fanny Hill sex is its own reward as much as the money it pays.

Final Grade

8/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Quote:

"...and now, disengag’d from the shirt, I saw, with wonder and surprise, what? not the play-thing of a boy, not the weapon of a man, but a maypole of so enormous a standard, that had proportions been observ’d, it must have belong’d to a young giant. Its prodigious size made me shrink again; yet I could not, without pleasure, behold, and even ventur’d to feel, such a length, such a breadth of animated ivory! perfectly well turn’d and fashion’d, the proud stiffness of which distended its skin, whose smooth polish and velvet softness might vie with that of the most delicate of our sex, and whose exquisite whiteness was not a little set off by a sprout of black curling hair round the root, through the jetty sprigs of which the fair skin shew’d as in a fine evening you may have remark’d the clear light ether through the branchwork of distant trees over-topping the summit of a hill: then the broad and blueish-casted incarnate of the head, and blue serpentines of its veins, altogether compos’d the most striking assemblage of figure and colours in nature. In short, it stood an object of terror and delight.

"But what was yet more surprising, the owner of this natural curiosity, through the want of occasions in the strictness of his home-breeding, and the little time he had been in town not having afforded him one, was hitherto an absolute stranger, in practice at least, to the use of all that manhood he was so nobly stock’d with; and it now fell to my lot to stand his first trial of it, if I could resolve to run the risks of its disproportion to that tender part of me, which such an oversiz’d machine was very fit to lay in ruins."

BBC made a version of it:

31. Henry Fielding - The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749)

Review

This has been one of the books I've most enjoyed reading while going through this list, with the possible exception of Dom Quixote none have given me more pleasure while reading. Tom Jones is another thick book, divided into 18 volumes, but next to Clarissa it is a pamphlet.

Fortunately, unlike Clarissa, it is also very funny. You might like or dislike Fielding's introductions to each volume where he gives his own opinions about a myriad of thing, but I am sure that you will at least love and hate the characters of the book.

Fielding makes an excellent job of making the reader sympathise with the rakish Tom Jones the honoured Allworthy or the almost perfect Sophia Western, hate Blifil, Square and Thwackum and laugh with Squire Western.

The constant twists and turns of the plot keep the reader interested as does the sheer need to see Blifil get his comeuppance. One of the novels with the greatest number of enduring characters that I have had the pleasure to read for this list. Highly Recommended.

Final Grade

10/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Few novels, indeed, have aroused such stark and abiding evaluative disagreements as 'Tom Jones'. From the first, what some readers hailed as a refreshingly broad-spirited tolerance was denounced by others, like Richardson, as moral coarseness and special pleading. Coleridge's admiration for the book's plot (shared by Smollett and Thackeray) as one of the three most perfect in literature ... was the reverse of Dr Johnson's or Frank Kermode's dismissal of it as clockwork. The chatty asides and prefatory discourses which charmed Empson were so disliked by Somerset Maugham that his own edition of 'Tom Jones' simply left the latter out. The omnipresent controlling narrator who fascinated Gide with his artiness and warmed Battestin with his genial wisdom struck Ford Madox Ford as boringly and clumsily intrusive.


Someone made a fan video for Blifil... gotta love the internet: