Gargantua and Pantagruel

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François Rabelais

Literature

Aug 9, 2018

Salaciously funny and frank about the facts of life, Gargantua and Pantagruel is a sourcebook of both elaborate satire and earthy humor. As novelist Anthony Burgess once noted, “What Rabelais rubs our noses in is not dirt but the remarkable fact that man is a kind of sewer with a holy spirit hovering over it.” An episodic novel about the adventures of the giant Gargantua, his gigantic son, Pantagruel, the latter’s companion, Panurge, and a broad cast of their friends, enemies, and foils, this sprawling mock-heroic romance is both an uninhibited celebration of the physical and an exuberant commendation of the values of Renaissance humanism over the strictures of scholasticism.

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John Fields

Mar 26, 2019

I read it as a freshman in college in 1969. at that age it was a revelation that people had a sense of humor so long ago

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