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    Jurgen (Barnes & Noble Digital Library): A Comedy of Justice
    Unavailable
    Jurgen (Barnes & Noble Digital Library): A Comedy of Justice
    Unavailable
    Jurgen (Barnes & Noble Digital Library): A Comedy of Justice
    Ebook358 pages5 hours

    Jurgen (Barnes & Noble Digital Library): A Comedy of Justice

    By James Branch Cabell

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    About this ebook

    Published in 1919, and the subject of a notorious obscenity trial, Jurgen is the second in Cabell's Poictesme series, and is certainly the author's most famous novel.  Jurgen, an old pawnbroker magically granted a second youth, embarks through time and space on a series of sexual conquests while ostensibly searching for his missing wife. A tale of the tragedy of human nature.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBarnes & Noble
    Release dateMar 22, 2011
    ISBN9781411444294
    Unavailable
    Jurgen (Barnes & Noble Digital Library): A Comedy of Justice
    Author

    James Branch Cabell

    James Branch Cabell; (April 14, 1879 – May 5, 1958) was an American author of fantasy fiction and belles-lettres. Cabell was well-regarded by his contemporaries, including H. L. Mencken, Edmund Wilson, and Sinclair Lewis. His works were considered escapist and fit well in the culture of the 1920s, when they were most popular. For Cabell, veracity was "the one unpardonable sin, not merely against art, but against human welfare." Although escapist, Cabell's works are ironic and satirical. Mencken disputed Cabell's claim to romanticism and characterized him as "really the most acidulous of all the anti-romantics. His gaudy heroes ... chase dragons precisely as stockbrokers play golf." Cabell saw art as an escape from life, but found that, once the artist creates his ideal world, it is made up of the same elements that make the real one

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    Reviews for Jurgen (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

    4/5

    152 ratings8 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Outrageously funny and ribald satire as the rakish Jurgen lies and seduces his way through Heaven, Hell and all points between. The chapter 'Divers Imbroglios Of King Smoit' is worth reading again and again as is the obscenity trial Jurgen faces before a dung beetle prosecutor (a chapter added by Cabell after he was subjected to just such a trial as a result of this book).
    • 3/5
      A middle-aged pawn broker, encounters a magical/pagan deity and is granted a do-over..He uses it as he wishes, and the world is relatively unchanged by his actions...perhaps he is a bit improved...perhaps not. Cabell's prose is not my favourite style, yet the book is famous. I think I read the 1928 reprint, as the Dover edition came out after my recorded reading.
    • 4/5
      Rabelais, Dante and Homer explore the human condition; with fewer fart jokes, and more scepter, sword and staff jokes. For a long while, I thought the book a bit old-fashioned in its approach to the genders. I still think that, but I realized toward the end that Cabell's allegory is big enough for readers of either gender.
    • 3/5
      I find him a bit of a chore to read and miss much of his humor. Another whacky ride, but the language is amazing.
    • 5/5
      Cabell is the fantasy writer of the road not taken: urbane, sophisticated, civilized -- which also means dependent on a web of allusions and on the reader's grounding in his predecessors.Jurgen is the best-known of his novels and one of his best. It does not require (but is enriched by) prior knowledge of his Poictesme; it is assisted more by having the general background knowledge that an educated (and a classically-educated) reader would have had in the early 20th Century, though that is not absolutely required, either.It helps in reading the story to keep in the back of one's mind things like Jean-Baptiste Pérès' demonstration that Napoleon was a solar myth, and keep an eye on the calendar.The pawnbroker Jurgen goes in search of his wife, who has been taken away by Koschei, and manages to come up against various mythical, legendary, and generally non-earthly realms and their rulers. He also passes from lady friend to lady friend, some not entirely human, as he goes. He is clever, not averse to dissembling, and adaptable: Odysseus to Dom Manuel's Ajax, Cabell's pre-emeinent example of the gallant approach to life. He ends up returning to domesticity and to the erasure of his travels.Cabell was resolutely non-heroic in attitude, and his type of fantasy, perhaps more reminiscent of the French prose tradition (Rabelais, Voltaire, Proust, Alain-Fournier) than of the English in its wit and structure, has had little impact on the writers of the later 20th Century. (Heinlein may make gestures towards Cabell in Job, also titled "A Comedy of Justice", but it's hard to imagine a writer less equipped to write Cabellian literature than Heinlein.)
    • 3/5
      This comic fantasy caused quite a stir in its day. But it's not all the interesting today. Episodic and doesn't hang together too well.
    • 1/5
      I read this on Dec 26 and Dec 27. 1051. On Dec 26 I said of it: "Started reading Jurgen. What a funny book--risque, materialist, mocking, but yet quiteentertaining in its way; though the ludicrous gets a little worse increasingly." On Dec 27 I said: "Finshed Jurgen. I need never again bother reading anything by James Branch Cabell."
    • 5/5
      One of many beautiful, satirical, bawdy, and gently ironic fantasies. Cabell was a notable literary figure at one point, but his mannered language seems to have fallen out of style.