Sunday, November 16, 2003
JUST FINISHED: Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. This was a revisiting of a novel that I was supposed to have read end-to-end in high school and chickened out on the commitment. I think out of all of them, I managed to slog through at least On the Beach by Neville Shute and Orwell's Animal Farm (although in junior high, and of my own free will). The rest of them I leaned into with all the hopefulness of somebody doing the right thing, but conked out after about 20 pages or so. To add insult to injury, when we were tested for On The Beach, the kids who only skimmed the book for the answers to the study questions got higher marks on the final test than I did. I remember being prouder of that mark at the time, since I earned it was a certain amount of honesty; they thought I was out of my mind, and looking back, I can't say I blame them.
Hopefully, you can see I'm fighting years of knee-jerk conditioning to finish any of these books at all. I'm still looking at that 1150 page copy of Tale of of the Genii which was one of my QPB membership selections with a bit of trepedation. Over the past few years, though, I've been warming up to Mark Twain. His cynical view of the world, moreso as he got older, gets more and more appealing all the time. Do a web search for "The War Prayer" if you really need proof.
Everybody knows the outline of this story, about how runaway Huck and escaped slave Jim hit the river on a raft and, in the process, develop a fast friendship. There are a few less friendly things you probably already know about this work, mainly that Twain has Huck drop the "N-bomb" at least 211 times in the course of the story. That's a whole essay in itself, but kids talk like the people closest to them--family, other adults, friends--and if that's the word a kid was raised on, it's dishonest to represent his world any other way. Having said that, I still wouldn't put the original version of this book in kids' hands until they had a better idea of the world they live in. With some of the current crop, that means they'll be denied for quite some time, but it's probably for the best. I also have to agree with the folks who say the "evasion" section is a bit of a letdown, and maybe more than a little mean (if you don't know what I'm talking about, it's better not to go into it, except to say that it's just like Tom Sawyer to make a simple plan excruciatingly complicated). Still, there's plenty of good material and genuinely human moments to make the story worth your time.
I went in for the Annotated edition edited by Michael Patrick Hearn, which is a steal and a half if you can find it on the bargain table at Borders like I did. It's a coffee-table size book, which makes it a bit harder to take to work with you, but still a nice one for the bookshelf. Not only does it have copious footnotes supplying biography, culture, context, and skimmings from 120 years worth of criticial thought on the story, but also two "suppressed" passages from the original manuscript as extras, all the first edition illustrations, and (God help me) a 150 page introduction. I skimmed it before I jumped into the meat of the book, and I'm sure I'll get back to it before I die. The whole production screams, Cartman-style, "YOU WILL RESPECT MAH AUTHORITAH!" and so I do. If you go with another edition, and there are several floating around right now, the University of Virginia's site on Huck is a great supplement.
Hopefully, you can see I'm fighting years of knee-jerk conditioning to finish any of these books at all. I'm still looking at that 1150 page copy of Tale of of the Genii which was one of my QPB membership selections with a bit of trepedation. Over the past few years, though, I've been warming up to Mark Twain. His cynical view of the world, moreso as he got older, gets more and more appealing all the time. Do a web search for "The War Prayer" if you really need proof.
Everybody knows the outline of this story, about how runaway Huck and escaped slave Jim hit the river on a raft and, in the process, develop a fast friendship. There are a few less friendly things you probably already know about this work, mainly that Twain has Huck drop the "N-bomb" at least 211 times in the course of the story. That's a whole essay in itself, but kids talk like the people closest to them--family, other adults, friends--and if that's the word a kid was raised on, it's dishonest to represent his world any other way. Having said that, I still wouldn't put the original version of this book in kids' hands until they had a better idea of the world they live in. With some of the current crop, that means they'll be denied for quite some time, but it's probably for the best. I also have to agree with the folks who say the "evasion" section is a bit of a letdown, and maybe more than a little mean (if you don't know what I'm talking about, it's better not to go into it, except to say that it's just like Tom Sawyer to make a simple plan excruciatingly complicated). Still, there's plenty of good material and genuinely human moments to make the story worth your time.
I went in for the Annotated edition edited by Michael Patrick Hearn, which is a steal and a half if you can find it on the bargain table at Borders like I did. It's a coffee-table size book, which makes it a bit harder to take to work with you, but still a nice one for the bookshelf. Not only does it have copious footnotes supplying biography, culture, context, and skimmings from 120 years worth of criticial thought on the story, but also two "suppressed" passages from the original manuscript as extras, all the first edition illustrations, and (God help me) a 150 page introduction. I skimmed it before I jumped into the meat of the book, and I'm sure I'll get back to it before I die. The whole production screams, Cartman-style, "YOU WILL RESPECT MAH AUTHORITAH!" and so I do. If you go with another edition, and there are several floating around right now, the University of Virginia's site on Huck is a great supplement.
|| Eric 6:36 PM#
