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'Lost in a Good Book' Jasper Fforde


sirinrob

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This is the sequel to 'The Eyre Affair' and continues Thursday Next's adventures. Like its predecesor it is chock full of literary references, puns, in-jokes and general silliness. This time round, Jasper seems to have elected to use several books as key references within the novel. The books I identified are

 

'Great Expectations' Charles Dickens

'Alice in Wonderland' and 'Alice Through the Looking Glass' Lewis Carroll

'The Trial' Franz Kafka

 

Surprisingly he doesn't make a lot of the Lewis Carroll material other than the Red Queen and the UAoW (Cheshire) Cat. 'Great Expectations features heavily with Miss Havisham. The chapter that features Thursday Next's trial is a wonderful parody of chapters 1 and 2 of Kafka's 'The Trail'. Jasper has taken that material and twisted it so he can use direct quotes from it, and also make a very sly reference to 'Bleak house' Charles Dickens. In my view he had real fun with this because he was involved in a BBC production of 'TheTrial'. There are traces of the the Kafka scattered around as well - the interview with Flanker is an example.

 

Besides the main books noted, I spotted references to:

 

'David Copperfield'

'Our Mutual Friend'

'Bleak House'

Sense and Sensibility' -Austen

'The Library of Babel' - Borges

'Rebecca' du Maurier

'Tess of the Dubervilles'

'Twelfth Night' Shakespeare

'Jerry Cornelius' Micheal Moorcock

 

There are others but I'll leave them to others to spot :lol:

 

I wont attempt to list all the puns etc as a) there are a lot and :lol: it would spoil the fun.

 

Generally , Jasper takes a pot shot at all sorts of targets, yuppies, middle class grumpies, politicians (including the nice Mr Blair), corporations etc. Lots of aircraft references (can't think why :hug:). I didn't see the twist concerning Miles coming either - Jasper is a rotter:tong:

 

I thoroughly enjoyed this and now onto 'Well of Lost Plots' . To reiterate a point made by BJ, you have to read these in order or it wont make sense. Also for this one I'd recommend reading chapters 1 and 2 of the 'The Trial' by Kafka.

Edited by sirinrob
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Good review there my friend :lol: I don't believe I've ever posted mine on here as it was written before I joined, so here it is:

 

Even better than "The Eyre Affair"!

 

There's a trial in Kafka's "Trial" (this chapter made my head spin so much I had to read it three times and then accept it would always baffle me; Franz would have been proud), a Miss Havisham so real she hops off the page and beats you with her stick for blaspheming (I don't dare read "Great Expectations" now; I'm actually afraid Dickens's potrait of her won't do justice to Jasper Fforde's...!), a loveable Cheshire Cat-turned librarian, the greatest Shakespeare discovery in the history of history, an all-too-realistic contemporary art exibition, plus more of everything you will have loved from the first book: Thursday's delightful time-travelling dad, her adorable dodo, her complicated love life; not to mention pure evil, alive and not, human and not.

 

This sent me scouting various Waterstone's for "The Well of Lost Plots" - which leads me to a gripe: why do clever, funny, precious authors like Jasper Fforde get so little bookshop shelf-space dedicated to them (...)? Books like this should be thrown at people's heads just so they come across them, not hidden like something to be ashamed of!

 

One minor note: do not try to start from here. Jasper Fforde's magical world is by this point far too developed for it to make much sense: this is not a series of stand-alone books, it is a continuous story that needs reading in the order it's been written... unless you want to end up very confused, and unable to understand what all the hype is about. Which would be a shame, because for once it is a highly justified hype.

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