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A review by johnnybuonomo
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
5.0
I went back and read this again after a good many years in part because it is lauded by so many authors (see toptenbooks.net) and I do occasionally defer to authority at least for recommendations. Hopefully they have not affected my judgment that this is an excellent novel.
The voices (mostly those of Huck and Jim) not only have great musicality and yield vivid characterization but show poetic sensitivity.
It succeeds on the fundamental level of providing an entertaining and emotionally involving story and characters with whom one can sympathize. The best way for me to express the other reasons I like this novel is to say that the events and images are 'charged' in certain ways.
First, they are charged with a strange poetic quality. No doubt, this is partly because I am unfamiliar with the setting and culture in the intimate way Twain was. Consequently, the image of pigs cooling themselves on church floors strikes me as delightfully odd. Additionally, many of scenes are painted in a mythological light especially by Jim (e.g. his etiological myth of stars).
Second, Jim and Huck's story largely consists of them passing through the stories of others and this give the events a quality of mystery, otherness, something like that... The reader feels the weight of what goes unsaid.
Third, there is the moral aspect. I get turned off when there is a 'moral of the story' but Twain incorporates questions of morality and philosophy as a writer and not as a metaphysician pretending to be a writer does-- they are not abstract questions but everyday human ones.
It's also pretty funny.
I wasn't crazy about the ending sequence, but that's my only qualm.
The voices (mostly those of Huck and Jim) not only have great musicality and yield vivid characterization but show poetic sensitivity.
It succeeds on the fundamental level of providing an entertaining and emotionally involving story and characters with whom one can sympathize. The best way for me to express the other reasons I like this novel is to say that the events and images are 'charged' in certain ways.
First, they are charged with a strange poetic quality. No doubt, this is partly because I am unfamiliar with the setting and culture in the intimate way Twain was. Consequently, the image of pigs cooling themselves on church floors strikes me as delightfully odd. Additionally, many of scenes are painted in a mythological light especially by Jim (e.g. his etiological myth of stars).
Second, Jim and Huck's story largely consists of them passing through the stories of others and this give the events a quality of mystery, otherness, something like that... The reader feels the weight of what goes unsaid.
Third, there is the moral aspect. I get turned off when there is a 'moral of the story' but Twain incorporates questions of morality and philosophy as a writer and not as a metaphysician pretending to be a writer does-- they are not abstract questions but everyday human ones.
It's also pretty funny.
I wasn't crazy about the ending sequence, but that's my only qualm.