Edition: Voyager, 2000
On opening Vineland, it is almost immediately clear that this is going to be a riotous novel. By the third chapter, the reader has been introduced to a man who makes his living by annually throwing himself through a plate glass window wearing a dress to qualify for mental illness disability benefit, a punk band named Billy Barf and the Vomitones, hired unheard to play at a traditional Mafia wedding by pretending to be Italian, and an FBI agent who may also be an escaped lunatic.
There is a bit of a dip in quality in the middle, once the flashbacks to the early seventies begin to take over, and from that point on Vineland is less funny. I don't think this is just due to my inability to conentrate, though I was extremely tired while reading this section of the novel.
The theme of Vineland is the hippy dream turning sour, and in particular the effects of the US government's attempts to extinguish the counter-culture. The main narrative is set in the mid-eighties, during Ronald Reagan's re-election campaign, and it is clear that Pynchon wants to make two points: first, that the repercussions of this crackdown affected lives both on the hippy side and in the law enforcement agencies right through the next fifteen years; and, second, that it was worth warning his readership about parallels between Nixon and Reagan.
"Vinland" is of course the name used by the Vikings to (almost certainly) mean the American continent, so implies that this is a novel about all of America - in other words, Pynchon intends to write what has been described as "the great American novel". However, reading it suggests that actually he wanted to subvert and satirise the idea of the great American novel. By making Vineland in the book a small (fictional) town in northern California, he is perhaps making a dig at the limited horizons of eighties American culture, and this is doubled by concentrating on hippy culture, never involving anything other than a small minority of US citizens.
Gravity's Rainbow and V. might have a bigger literary reputation, but of the Pynchon novels I have read - not all of them by any means - this is the most accessible, and the funniest. Each chapter in the first half made me laugh out loud at some point, even on re-reading. It has an easier plot to follow than Gravity's Rainbow in particular, which also helps make it an easier read.
I would rate Vineland at 7/10.
Wednesday, 12 August 2009
Monday, 10 August 2009
E.E. "Doc" Smith: First Lensman (1950)
Edition: Panther, 1972Review number: 100
The second novel in Smith's Lensman series, First Lensman is a unified narrative (unlike Triplanetary which precedes it). It follows on directly from the events of the first book, detailing the later stages in the fight against drugs and corruption led by Virgil Samms. (Samms plays a comparatively small part in Triplanetary, which was more concerned with the swashbuckling adventures of his sub-ordinates.)
The first half of the novel is an explanation of the origins of the Lens after which the series as a whole is known. Various problems are beginning to dog the Triplanetary Service. Corruption is taking hold, particularly in the fight against drugs; criminals are impersonating officers of the Service, using faked ids. A mysterious conviction grows that answers to these problems can be found through a visit to the planet Arisia, shunned as a "ghost planet" both by legitimate spacemen and by pirates and drugs runners.
Arriving at Arisia, Samms meets an entity who calls itself "Mentor". He is given a mysterious artefact, a Lens; it is a telepathic crystal, tuned to his mind alone and capable of enhancing the powers that his mind possesses. Mentor assures him that no one will be given a Lens who is unworthy of one, and that only the incorruptible will wear them.
Samms is a bit bemused by this generosity, but the reader knows the background to it: the eons-old war between the Arisians and Eddorians, the Arisians continually trying to build up civilisation, the Eddorians to knock it down.
The second half of the book tells of a North American presidential election (Canada, the US and Mexico together forming a single state) fought by the officers of the Triplanetary Service (as 'Cosmocrats') on the right and the pirates and drugs runners on the left. Smith's politics are one of the most difficult aspects of his writing style for a modern European reader to swallow - as they cater rather more for stereotypical American political viewpoints a US citizen may find them easier to accept. He persistently holds the belief that any intelligent person must support the right, with the left only gaining votes through stupidity, corruption and vote-rigging. It is a view perhaps explicable in an American of his time, who had lived through some of the most corrupt scandals of American town-hall politics. Smith's right wing politics were of a reasonably benign kind, characterised by a strong belief in intelligent capitalism most clearly expressed in Subspace Encounter. He was relatively free from racism, particularly when compared to contemporaries, though this is perhaps debatable given the almost complete absence of non-white human beings in his novels.
The first half of First Lensman is easier to read, then, than the second, though the ins and outs of the political campaign are an interesting change from the standard military space opera trappings of the rest of the series. If Heinlein's novels transfer an idealised American small-town background to everywhere in the universe (see review of Rolling Stones), then this novel takes a similar approach with an American large town.
Wednesday, 5 August 2009
Fred Vargas: The Three Evangelists (1995)
Edition: Vintage, 2007
Fred Vargas' only standalone novel so far is an intriguingly different detective story. This is clear from the bizarre opening, in which retired opera singer Sophia Siméonidis wakes one morning to find a new tree has been planted in her garden overnight. After worrying in silence for a month, she approaches her next door neighbours, three effectively unemployed historians (known as the Evangelists because their names are Matthias, Marc and Lucien) and a senior policeman forced into disgraced retirement. She asks them to pose as council workers and dig up the tree, once they suggest that it would be a good way for someone to hide a body.
When nothing is found, it seems as though the whole thing was just a fuss over nothing, until Sophia goes missing. Then the Evangelists begin looking into the mystery in earnest, feeling that their research skills and the fact that they are not policemen might make it possible to discover things that the official investigation cannot. While this latter reason is commonly used in crime fiction to justify amateur investigations, it is not one that would be recommended by police forces around the world!
The Three Evangelists is a character led detective story, with quirky touches like the tree lending extra interest. (I have been told that this sort of whimsy is typical of Vargas, and that to some it might become tiresome after two or three novels.) It has a brilliantly put together ending, where the pace suddenly picks up for the last few chapters and the solution is revealed.
Vargas has now won three of the last four International Crime Daggers, despite other writers translated into English having a higher profile. The Three Evangelists was the first of her winners, and clearly deserved to do so. This is not just a well written detective story, it is different from the usual run of things in the genre and so stands out all the more. I would rate it at 8/10.
Wednesday, 8 July 2009
Nick Harkaway: The Gone-Away World (2008)
Edition: Windmill Books, 2009
The first chapter of The Gone-Away World describes an unusual post-apocalyptic scenario: the Earth has suffered a complete warping of reality, where places disappear and people turn into monsters, except where the mysterious Pipe pumps Stuff into the air to stabilise normality. The next 350 pages of the novel describe how this disaster came about, through the eyes of a faithful sidekick. Although this sounds like a typical science fiction scenario, much of the noel - almost the whole of the first half - is not really of the genre. The lengthy flashback is a gonzo coming of age story of one of the people who witnessed the catastrophe. This is told in a darkly humourous manner, quite brilliantly evocative of an eccentric background, finding space to parody martial arts film clichés.
Harkaway also has a taste for philosophising, and tackles some big themes: the relationship between physics, philosophy and psychology, and the origin of evil (in particular the immorality of groups which commit crimes their members would never consider on their own). This may not be to every reader's taste, but a thoughtful narrator is something I like. Even the theme of the Pipe and the Stuff has something to say, about the way that imagination is related to the real world around us.
The novel also has a pretty good twist, which is only revealed about two thirds of the way through but which works rather like the twist in the film Sixth Sense, in that many readers might well want to go back to the beginning and reread it in view of the revelation. I don't want to give it away here, so I will say no more about it.
One of the issues in modern literature, the subject of a well known book of criticism The Anxiety of Influence, is how a writer relates to the vast quantity of written words that precede his or her work. Nick Harkaway puts it like this, in the acknowledgments at the end of The Gone-Away World: "I have, as is customary, borrowed from (read pillaged) every story I have ever loved to write my own." None of the writers specifically mentioned (Wodehouse, Conan Doyle and Dumas) seemed obvious direct influences to me. But it is certainly true that I was reminded of other writers continually as I read his debut: Joseph Heller, China Miéville, John Barth, Iain Banks, Evelyn Waugh and so on, though in the end I have decided that the book that it is most similar to in tone and content is Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.
The Gone-Away World, borrowed from the library, has gone on my wishlist of books to purchase. I would rate it at 9/10.
Friday, 5 June 2009
Frederik Pohl: Man Plus (1976)
Edition: Millennium, 2000
Man Plus won the Nebula award the year before his next novel, Gateway, swept the board of science fiction awards. It could be argued that Gateway is the perfect science fiction novel, because in it Pohl does many of the things which the genre is famous for superlatively: big ideas, interesting (if off-stage) aliens, journeys of personal discovery in intriguing environments, extrapolation of current trends and ideas into the future (in a rather dystopian way); and does it with humour using a flawed central character - a cowardly hero all too easy to identify with. But it does stay well within the traditions of the genre, while the now less well known Man Plus is more adventurous, exploring emotional territory outside the usual comfort zone of genre fiction (of any genre, not just science fiction).
Man Plus is set in what would be the 1990s (during the tenure of the forty second US president, who was Bill Clinton in the real world). But this is a world in which the tensions of the Cold War continued to escalate, and it seems likely (either through all out war between China and other nations or through environmental problems) the earth will become uninhabitable in the short term. So the American space program undertakes a new project: Man Plus. The aim is to get man on Mars, and making it possible for the human race to continue there by re-engineering the colonists, starting with one man.
The central character, Roger Torraway, is not just an experienced astronaut butt one of the best known heroes of the space program, after the rescue of some stranded cosmonauts. He is one of the scientists involved in the Man Plus project, but when the man who is being transformed into a cyborg who can live unprotected on the surface of Mars through a long series of operations has a heart attack and dies, he is the alternate choice who becomes the primary candidate. From this point, the novel is about his emotional reaction to the changes made by the surgeons and engineers to his body, to realising that he is going to part from his wife, and to the philosophical (and theological) dilemmas which the transformation suggests.
From the genre point of view, his transformations effectively make him an alien (indeed, one of the most iconic type of aliens in science fiction: a Martian). Writing about understanding the alien has always been one of the most philosophical aspects of the genre, tied up as it is with questions about the nature of intelligence and humanity. Pohl even finds time for a little James Blish-like discussion of some not immediately obvious theological implications of the transformation process, courtesy of one of the scientists involved who is also a Catholic priest.
One major similarity with Gateway is that Pohl's attitude is not "be amazed by the science", but "how would this really feel?". This is something which marks him out from many of his contemporary science fiction authors, and what led Edmund Cooper, one of his colleagues, to say "In his grasp of scientific and technological possibilities, Pohl ranks with Asimov and Clarke, but he has greater originality than either" (as quoted on the back cover of this edition). Like many genre fans, my earliest science fiction reading was Asimov and Clarke (along with Heinlein), and they remain authors I go back too, despite their flaws as writers. Pohl is a more grown-up reading experience, requiring more engagement from the reader, but offering deeper rewards.
Man Plus won the Nebula award the year before his next novel, Gateway, swept the board of science fiction awards. It could be argued that Gateway is the perfect science fiction novel, because in it Pohl does many of the things which the genre is famous for superlatively: big ideas, interesting (if off-stage) aliens, journeys of personal discovery in intriguing environments, extrapolation of current trends and ideas into the future (in a rather dystopian way); and does it with humour using a flawed central character - a cowardly hero all too easy to identify with. But it does stay well within the traditions of the genre, while the now less well known Man Plus is more adventurous, exploring emotional territory outside the usual comfort zone of genre fiction (of any genre, not just science fiction).
Man Plus is set in what would be the 1990s (during the tenure of the forty second US president, who was Bill Clinton in the real world). But this is a world in which the tensions of the Cold War continued to escalate, and it seems likely (either through all out war between China and other nations or through environmental problems) the earth will become uninhabitable in the short term. So the American space program undertakes a new project: Man Plus. The aim is to get man on Mars, and making it possible for the human race to continue there by re-engineering the colonists, starting with one man.
The central character, Roger Torraway, is not just an experienced astronaut butt one of the best known heroes of the space program, after the rescue of some stranded cosmonauts. He is one of the scientists involved in the Man Plus project, but when the man who is being transformed into a cyborg who can live unprotected on the surface of Mars through a long series of operations has a heart attack and dies, he is the alternate choice who becomes the primary candidate. From this point, the novel is about his emotional reaction to the changes made by the surgeons and engineers to his body, to realising that he is going to part from his wife, and to the philosophical (and theological) dilemmas which the transformation suggests.
From the genre point of view, his transformations effectively make him an alien (indeed, one of the most iconic type of aliens in science fiction: a Martian). Writing about understanding the alien has always been one of the most philosophical aspects of the genre, tied up as it is with questions about the nature of intelligence and humanity. Pohl even finds time for a little James Blish-like discussion of some not immediately obvious theological implications of the transformation process, courtesy of one of the scientists involved who is also a Catholic priest.
One major similarity with Gateway is that Pohl's attitude is not "be amazed by the science", but "how would this really feel?". This is something which marks him out from many of his contemporary science fiction authors, and what led Edmund Cooper, one of his colleagues, to say "In his grasp of scientific and technological possibilities, Pohl ranks with Asimov and Clarke, but he has greater originality than either" (as quoted on the back cover of this edition). Like many genre fans, my earliest science fiction reading was Asimov and Clarke (along with Heinlein), and they remain authors I go back too, despite their flaws as writers. Pohl is a more grown-up reading experience, requiring more engagement from the reader, but offering deeper rewards.
Monday, 25 May 2009
Stieg Larsson: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2005)
Translated: Reg Ketland (2008)
Edition: MacLehose Press, 2008
The central character of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Mikael Blomkvist, is an investigative financial journalist who publishes a well-regarded magazine, Millennium. After its latest exposé of a corrupt businessman, he is sued for libel, and, abandoned by his sources, loses, leaving his career and reputation in ruins. But then he is offered a job by another well-known Swedish businessman, to spend a year writing a history of his family and their firm while really working on the mystery which has obsessed Henrik Vanger for forty years. In 1966, Vanger's great niece went missing, and he has mysteriously received a flower each anniversary of the disappearance.
Almost as important is the character who provides the title of the novel. Lisbeth Salander is in her twenties, but not permitted a full adult life by the Swedish state after her refusal to interact with the world around her as a child led to her institutionalisation as mentally deficient. Yet give her a problem which interests her, and she works obsessively on it, which combines with a photographic memory to make her a great investigator.
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is a gripping novel of investigation into the pastt of a fascinating but awful family, most of whom are nasty pieces of work, many of whom hate most of the others, who were heavily involved with Sweden's Nazi party, which includes drunks and hermits as well as obsessives. But it is actually the characters of Blomkvist and Salander which are the focus of the novel, and their strengths and shortcomings give a depth to it beyond that of most thrillers. It is also quite academic, as the action is mostly in the discoveries made about the past, but that doesn't stop the story being exciting. The background of the author as a financial investigative journalist similar to that of Blomkvist is clear not just from the verisimilitude of the setting, but from the style of writing, even in translation.
A few years ago, there was a short space of time during which I read several great fantasy novels. This year, it seems to be the same with literary thrillers translated from Swedish. But this novel, and its successors in the Millennium trilogy, have made it to English a great deal quicker than The Gentlemen. Cynically, this seems to me to be at least partly because the story of their production - delivered to a publisher by a respected financial journalist who died before publication - gives an added marketing hook to the novels.
This is an excellent translation of an excellent novel, and I look forward to reading the remainder of the Millennium trilogy. My rating - 9/10.
Edition: MacLehose Press, 2008
The central character of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Mikael Blomkvist, is an investigative financial journalist who publishes a well-regarded magazine, Millennium. After its latest exposé of a corrupt businessman, he is sued for libel, and, abandoned by his sources, loses, leaving his career and reputation in ruins. But then he is offered a job by another well-known Swedish businessman, to spend a year writing a history of his family and their firm while really working on the mystery which has obsessed Henrik Vanger for forty years. In 1966, Vanger's great niece went missing, and he has mysteriously received a flower each anniversary of the disappearance.
Almost as important is the character who provides the title of the novel. Lisbeth Salander is in her twenties, but not permitted a full adult life by the Swedish state after her refusal to interact with the world around her as a child led to her institutionalisation as mentally deficient. Yet give her a problem which interests her, and she works obsessively on it, which combines with a photographic memory to make her a great investigator.
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is a gripping novel of investigation into the pastt of a fascinating but awful family, most of whom are nasty pieces of work, many of whom hate most of the others, who were heavily involved with Sweden's Nazi party, which includes drunks and hermits as well as obsessives. But it is actually the characters of Blomkvist and Salander which are the focus of the novel, and their strengths and shortcomings give a depth to it beyond that of most thrillers. It is also quite academic, as the action is mostly in the discoveries made about the past, but that doesn't stop the story being exciting. The background of the author as a financial investigative journalist similar to that of Blomkvist is clear not just from the verisimilitude of the setting, but from the style of writing, even in translation.
A few years ago, there was a short space of time during which I read several great fantasy novels. This year, it seems to be the same with literary thrillers translated from Swedish. But this novel, and its successors in the Millennium trilogy, have made it to English a great deal quicker than The Gentlemen. Cynically, this seems to me to be at least partly because the story of their production - delivered to a publisher by a respected financial journalist who died before publication - gives an added marketing hook to the novels.
This is an excellent translation of an excellent novel, and I look forward to reading the remainder of the Millennium trilogy. My rating - 9/10.
Friday, 15 May 2009
Titus Maccius Plautus: The Pot of Gold and Other Plays
Contains: Aulularia (The Pot of Gold), Menaechmi (The Brothers Menaechmus), Captivi (The Prisoners), Miles gloriosus (The Swaggering Soldier), and Pseudolus
Edition: Penguin, 1965
Translated: E.F. Watling, 1965
What makes a "perfect comedy"? The German critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing described one of the plays in this volume, Captivi (The Prisoners) as such, but it is unlikely to be an answer that would occur to many people asked this question today. Even if the field is restricted to stage comedies on the grounds that Lessing lived before the invention of moving pictures (ruling out such contenders as Some Like it Hot and Fawlty Towers), there are many plays which are funnier. Among my favourites, I might suggest Aristophanes' Frogs , Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Orton's Loot, Frayn's Noises Off. My father would have suggested farces by Feydeau or Labiche, I'm sure.
To Lessing, of course, the word "comedy" didn't just mean an amusing drama; it was a more technical term, describing a play with particular components and attributes. But even so, Captivi is an odd choice, as Watling points out in his introduction: for example, the real world geography of the Greek setting makes it virtually impossible for the action of the play to take place in one day, a requirement applied to drama by critics of the time, based on Aristotle's ideas in the Poetics. So why choose this one? Again, Watling makes a sensible suggestion, that the real issue is that the play does not have aspects which Lessing apparently viewed as distasteful in ancient literature (and particularly in the texts which could be used to teach in schools). In particular, there's no sexual content to the play, which is very unusual in ancient comedy, the surviving examples of which usually at least include bawdy jokes. Until fairly recently, there were still versions of Aristophanes which translated passages which were particularly rude into Latin, rather than into English which could be read by the uneducated, considered to have minds corruptible by such things. Instead, Captivi is about the ties between father and son (together with the mistaken identities which occur in almost every plot used by Plautus).
And Captivi is not even the best known of the five plays in the volume. Two of the others served as the inspiration for extremely famous later comedies. Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors is based on Menaechmi but takes the plot a step further by adding a second pair of twin brothers, increasing the potential for comic confusion at the risk of making belief in the actions on stage harder. Shakespeare may well be the greatest dramatist who ever lived, but this is an early play, and not one of his best; it has the air of an exercise rather than a drama involving characters based on human beings. On the other hand, Aulularia, the title play in this collection, inspired L'Avare by Molière, one of the greatest works by a great writer in his prime. Like Shakespeare, Molière added more to the plot, which to me suggests something of why Plautus is not as well known today as he used to be. My understanding is that these plays were produced as diversions during festivals - effectively another sideshow - so were not as long and or complex as Greek plays (which were the main attractions of the festivals they appeared were written for) or later plays which were the centrepiece of an evening's entertainment. The plays are short, one theme (almost one joke) affairs, without the subplots and subtlety we have come to expect from a full length three act drama in today's theatre. Perhaps it would be better to compare Plautus' output with one act comedies, like Shaffer's Black Comedy, but they are more like individual episodes from The Simpsons than anything produced for the stage now. Indeed, there are several parallels with the way that the animated sitcom works: plots as variations on standard themes; exaggerated everyman character; improbable events; and a happy ending.
Captivi is also not the funniest or cleverest play in this collection. The final pair here, Miles gloriosus and Pseudolus, are the best Plautus plays I have read. In both, the characters rise at least a little above the stereotypes, the jokes remain funny, and a little bit more length allows some extra complexity. These two are probably the place to start, if Shakespeare and Molière give you and interest in theirt sources of inspiration. (Not the ultimate source, because Plautus took most of his ideas from Greek originals, now mostly lost, but the closest you can get.)
The introduction to this collection states that these translations were made for use on the stage. Now, Penguin Classics translations of drama don't usually have that as their main aim; they are aimed at tthe reader, not the performer and tend to concentrate on being an accurate (if not word for word) translation of the best available edition of the original text. The Penguin Ibsen translations are obviously like this, if compared with the work of Michael Meyer or my father (among others). So, is this collection of Plautus plays an exception, or was Watling mistaken? There are certainly livelier translations of Plautus, while these are in turn livelier than some of the Penguin Classics drama that was published around the same time. I'm not so sure they would work so well on the stage; perhaps they would be good as a dramatised excerpt to liven up an academic seminar, but that isn't quite the same thing. But then I've never found Plautus as enjoyable as the more complex comedies listed at the start of this review, in any translation. There are problems with details. Some of the jokes could be better translated; there must be a better pun to describe cooks who are scoundrels than "rapscullions", for example. I'd give thee plays 6/10, and the translations, also now rather dated, 5/10.
Edition: Penguin, 1965
Translated: E.F. Watling, 1965
What makes a "perfect comedy"? The German critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing described one of the plays in this volume, Captivi (The Prisoners) as such, but it is unlikely to be an answer that would occur to many people asked this question today. Even if the field is restricted to stage comedies on the grounds that Lessing lived before the invention of moving pictures (ruling out such contenders as Some Like it Hot and Fawlty Towers), there are many plays which are funnier. Among my favourites, I might suggest Aristophanes' Frogs , Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Orton's Loot, Frayn's Noises Off. My father would have suggested farces by Feydeau or Labiche, I'm sure.
To Lessing, of course, the word "comedy" didn't just mean an amusing drama; it was a more technical term, describing a play with particular components and attributes. But even so, Captivi is an odd choice, as Watling points out in his introduction: for example, the real world geography of the Greek setting makes it virtually impossible for the action of the play to take place in one day, a requirement applied to drama by critics of the time, based on Aristotle's ideas in the Poetics. So why choose this one? Again, Watling makes a sensible suggestion, that the real issue is that the play does not have aspects which Lessing apparently viewed as distasteful in ancient literature (and particularly in the texts which could be used to teach in schools). In particular, there's no sexual content to the play, which is very unusual in ancient comedy, the surviving examples of which usually at least include bawdy jokes. Until fairly recently, there were still versions of Aristophanes which translated passages which were particularly rude into Latin, rather than into English which could be read by the uneducated, considered to have minds corruptible by such things. Instead, Captivi is about the ties between father and son (together with the mistaken identities which occur in almost every plot used by Plautus).
And Captivi is not even the best known of the five plays in the volume. Two of the others served as the inspiration for extremely famous later comedies. Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors is based on Menaechmi but takes the plot a step further by adding a second pair of twin brothers, increasing the potential for comic confusion at the risk of making belief in the actions on stage harder. Shakespeare may well be the greatest dramatist who ever lived, but this is an early play, and not one of his best; it has the air of an exercise rather than a drama involving characters based on human beings. On the other hand, Aulularia, the title play in this collection, inspired L'Avare by Molière, one of the greatest works by a great writer in his prime. Like Shakespeare, Molière added more to the plot, which to me suggests something of why Plautus is not as well known today as he used to be. My understanding is that these plays were produced as diversions during festivals - effectively another sideshow - so were not as long and or complex as Greek plays (which were the main attractions of the festivals they appeared were written for) or later plays which were the centrepiece of an evening's entertainment. The plays are short, one theme (almost one joke) affairs, without the subplots and subtlety we have come to expect from a full length three act drama in today's theatre. Perhaps it would be better to compare Plautus' output with one act comedies, like Shaffer's Black Comedy, but they are more like individual episodes from The Simpsons than anything produced for the stage now. Indeed, there are several parallels with the way that the animated sitcom works: plots as variations on standard themes; exaggerated everyman character; improbable events; and a happy ending.
Captivi is also not the funniest or cleverest play in this collection. The final pair here, Miles gloriosus and Pseudolus, are the best Plautus plays I have read. In both, the characters rise at least a little above the stereotypes, the jokes remain funny, and a little bit more length allows some extra complexity. These two are probably the place to start, if Shakespeare and Molière give you and interest in theirt sources of inspiration. (Not the ultimate source, because Plautus took most of his ideas from Greek originals, now mostly lost, but the closest you can get.)
The introduction to this collection states that these translations were made for use on the stage. Now, Penguin Classics translations of drama don't usually have that as their main aim; they are aimed at tthe reader, not the performer and tend to concentrate on being an accurate (if not word for word) translation of the best available edition of the original text. The Penguin Ibsen translations are obviously like this, if compared with the work of Michael Meyer or my father (among others). So, is this collection of Plautus plays an exception, or was Watling mistaken? There are certainly livelier translations of Plautus, while these are in turn livelier than some of the Penguin Classics drama that was published around the same time. I'm not so sure they would work so well on the stage; perhaps they would be good as a dramatised excerpt to liven up an academic seminar, but that isn't quite the same thing. But then I've never found Plautus as enjoyable as the more complex comedies listed at the start of this review, in any translation. There are problems with details. Some of the jokes could be better translated; there must be a better pun to describe cooks who are scoundrels than "rapscullions", for example. I'd give thee plays 6/10, and the translations, also now rather dated, 5/10.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
