Missouri Writers Pt. 2.
Many unexpected overlaps with Clotel.

3.23 ✴️

"The reader already knew how the expert works; he knows now how the other kind do it."

This was my first attempt to truly reading through and through a Mark Twain novel. It was difficult at first to understand his cadence and tone, but in the end, the story was rich and deep, complicated at times but thorough.
A story of pre-Civil War people coming to grips with the harsh realities of racism and what it means to be black, white or European living along the Mississippi river. All were struggling to find their true place in a conflicted America. Twain exposes the hypocritical nature of the antebellum ‘south’ in the middle ground state of Missouri.

The actual stories are typical Twain making social commentary while spinning his tales of farce and tragedy. The rest of the book, however, was essays dredged up from all corners of academia and critical reviews from over the years. God they gave me a headache as they spewed all sorts of perceived insights into Twain's writings and frame of mind. While the stories themselves were interesting and kept my attention, the reviews and essays felt like a cheese grater being dragged across my brain.

Pudd'nhead Wilson is an excellent book. Twain has many powerful points to make about the arbitrariness of race and the way it's socially constructed nature often interacted with slavery in very strange ways. The characters are generally all fascinating, even if they aren't very likeable. Roxy is a really great character who has to deal with the strange paradox of being considered black and a slave even though she appears white. Her actions throughout are not always full upstanding, but they are admirable. Her son, Tom, who she puts in place of her master's child, is also a fascinating character. He's not very sympathetic on a personal level, but his situation in much of the novel is fairly awful. The titular Pudd'nhead Wilson is also well developed. He's smart and interested in various strange hobbies, but he also buys into the same views on race that the rest of the townspeople do, which makes him somewhat less heroic in an interesting way. The plot is enjoyable, and while in some ways it's a bit simple and has many moments of parodying melodrama, it's also very effective and made me want to keep going to find out what happens next, which is always good. Plus, the story is interspersed with Twain's witty humor, which is always a nice addition.

Those Extraordinary Twins, on the other hand, is somewhat disappointing in comparison. It's certainly not bad, but it's also not particularly good. The characters are much more one-dimensional and generally only have one note to their actions. The titular twins provide most of the humor, as they are conjoined twins with opposite personalities, but even this grows stale before the story is over. I definitely recommend reading Pudd'nhead Wilson, but I can't really recommend this unless you're curious about the story that Pudd'nhead Wilson grew out of.

I went for the Oxford Mark Twain edition. Highly recommended. If you're going to spend time with the master, do it right. The edition is in hardback and it's a facsimile of the original 1893 printing, so you get all the illustrations and orthographic oddities.

This is my second OMT out of twenty-nine total. I've been thinking it'd be a nice life project to sit down and read them all.

why are you reading vonnegut but not reading twain? everything satrical you love about fiction, everything witty, everything damning, everything biting, everything uproariously human about modern fiction owes itself to twain. my favorite of his works, with connecticut yankee a close second. marvel at man's foolishness along with an embittered genius. a storyteller? a polemic? don't pick, just read.

Recommended to me by one of my old college professors, this was the book that got me into reading.
It was the first time I experienced the beauty of language and storytelling.
This book is also responsible for developing my obsession with Mark Twain.

Hard to rate this one; I read Pudd'nhead Wilson and started Those Extraordinary Twins but stopped after a few pages. Pudd'nhead Wilson's storyline was interesting/kept me interested, even though I could see the ending coming from a mile off, and I wanted to know how it all turned out. However, Pudd'nhead Wilson is the second Twain story I've read (the other being Huckleberry Finn) that features slaves/slavery and dialect, and I have to say - I don't enjoy them. I can't help but feel they are incredibly racist and haven't aged well.

I didn't enjoy the characters of Luigi and Angelo from Pudd'nhead Wilson enough to read an entire story about them and so lost interest in Those Extraordinary Twins after just a few pages.

But I recognize the storycraft is both is good. I think these just weren't to my taste.

Terrific classic. Genesis of CSI, if you think about it--early courtroom drama. I'd really be interested to know when the concept of the fingerprint being used as evidence came about, because Twain did a great job presenting it as if for the first time in this little historical town.

So there's this other item of personal note, meant especially for authors currently alive and writing. Twain's use of colloquial, phonetic language on behalf of African American slaves is beyond reproach given what he did to call attention to unfair treatment of people of color. He was arguably one of the first civil rights activists, if authorship can itself be considered activism, which I strongly believe.

In this book, the fact that I find phonetic use of colloquial speech distracting as a reader did not bother me other than early on, while I was adjusting; all the while I was certain that it would be well worth the patience in adjusting to the phonetic representations, and indeed I was far from disappointed.

So I take this review as an opportunity to make a side-note to other authors--I beg you, please don't spell colloquial speech patterns out painstakingly, and just as they sound as a habit throughout your manuscripts or publications. Split the difference somehow--maybe give us a taste and make references to it with a word or two as you go, if you're afraid we'll forget there's an accent in place. It's just distracting. Twain was entitled to this, you are not; get over it and write in the language you have chosen, leading us with the colloquial in the least distracting way that you can and still keep it represented, or I's gwine tuh give ya a whuping!

Twain's satire knows no bounds. Through the classic story of babes switched at birth, Twain mocks everything in sight, and manages to do so with humor and intrigue. Much like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I think this book set me down the path of loving to read classic literature.

Highest recommendation to any fans of Twain or a great story.