Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Just to be perfectly clear, I love this book. It is one of my all-time favorites, providing a humorous and profound take on theology, linguistics, psychology, sociology, literary criticism, and, most importantly, the superior tool for wiping oneself after defecating (according to the young Gargantua, that would be the neck of a well-downed goose). It's basically an obscene pack of Zen koan cards which will delight just about any intellectual type with a decent knowledge of the Western tradition. However, this edition falls short in a large number of ways. First of all, it's presented as a big, fat, "scholarly" edition, with lots of footnotes, chapter summaries, and aids for the reader to contextualize the information. Not that there's any problem with that in itself - Rabelais is certainly one of those authors that requires at least some knowledge of his intellectual predecessors - but it really disturbs the general flow and feel of the book and places it in the context of being some old and stuffy book read as a "primary source" that can give us insight into 16th-century France than for its own sake. Given that this book essentially ridicules such "old and venerable" texts by means of obscene humor resembling that used by South Park in our modern culture, I really don't think this is the best way to present Rabelais. Also, the books are presented in the order they were written rather than in the traditional order of Gargantua first, then Pantagruel, then the books which are actually numbered. Again, this isn't in itself a problem, except that it disrupts the narrative flow if one wishes to read this book as a whole, starting with the exploits of Gargantua and then moving to the adventures had by his son. The actual translation isn't terrible, but lacks the flow and subtlety of J.M. Cohen's translation. By contrast, Screech's work feels a bit choppy and as though he's trying to dumb down and explain everything to the reader, rather than produce an English version of Rabelais. Honestly, if I want to be extra-scholarly about everything, I'll just check out a French edition and some of the better books of literary criticism that already exist for this book from an academic library. If I want to read the actual book in my language and not bother myself with the scholarship that's been done on it, this edition won't cut it. Admittedly, part of my anger at this edition is the fact that Penguin printed it as a replacement to the J.M. Cohen translation, which is widely lauded as the best Rabelais translation in English and is my personal favorite out of all the ones I've read. Thus, the reader is not only presented with an unnecessarily "academic" edition which features a choppy translation, but is unable to easily obtain a better edition or translation (Cohen simply writes a short translator's introduction and then lets the text speak for itself, for the most part). My advice would be to not buy this new and instead try to find a used copy of the Cohen translation. Yes, this means that the copy you end up with will probably not be in as good shape as a new copy of this, but at least, you'll be dealing with a better translation and edition.