Monday 27 February 2012

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Started: Feb. 13
Completed: Feb. 22nd
ebook
Pages: ~160

I've read Huckleberry Finn before, of course, but it would have been more than 30 years ago.  A couple of things brought the book back to mind and back on the mental "list":  the recent publication of Twain's unexpurgated autobiography, and the recent controversy about publishing a version of Huck Finn that doesn't contain the word "n*****".

Huckleberry Finn didn't make a big impression on me when I read it as a kid.  For one thing, I've never been fond of books written in dialect. For another, it's a very "boyish" book on the surface, full of picaresque adventures that I found difficult to identify with.

But on rereading, the satire that was invisible to my childhood self is the most notable part of the book.  And the slave narratives I've read since then (most recently the Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill) gives a poignancy and urgency to Jim's plight that I couldn't understand in the same way back then.

Okay, now I get it.

2 comments:

  1. I recently reread Huckleberry Finn too. The satire is biting, but the big surprise for me was the connection to the Mississippi River. There's a scene where Huck is sheltering under some trees and waiting while a storm approaches, crashes through the area he is in, and then moves on and subsides, that can only have been written by someone who had experienced it, and felt deeply how beautiful it was. I had never noticed it at all when I originally read the book in my early teens.

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  2. Interesting. I'll have to look out for that the next time Huck Finn makes it on my agenda.

    When I was much younger, rereading felt like a waste of time. I'm really glad I got over that. Now I enjoy noticing different things about a book on rereading, and also noticing how I have changed since the last time.

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