كله يدلع نفسه..بالعقل و بالاصول اوعى تدلعها زيادة
دايما بتفكرني هذه الأغنية ب هاكلبيري فين ذلك الصبي الأشقر المطالب للابد بحق الانسان في ان يكون ملكا لنفسه مهما كلفه ذلك من مشاق و صراعات

صبي افاق شريد.. يكره العمل المنتظم و الذهاب للمدرسة او الكنيسة !! لا يبغى سوى : حرية منفلتة بلا حساب او عقاب..فيه لمحات من بيتر بان الصبي الابدي
نصيبه من العلم محدود..و من التربية معدوم♨
..ترق له ارملة و تتبناه ..و لكنه يتبطر على حياة الدعة و الشبع المصحوب بالادب و النظام بالطبع..و يهرب مع عبد اسمر هارب. .ليلعبا لعبة الحياة الكبرى ..الصراع لنيل حريتك

و عبر رحلتهما في الميسيسيبي⛵
..يسخر توين بقلم لاذع لا يضاهى من تقاليد المجتمع الأمريكي بطبقاته. من الكذب و الخرافات ..الجهل و التعليم..الثار و العبودية

قيمة الرواية تأتي من انها تفرق بين المبادىء الانسانية الصحيحة و القيم الزائفة التي تستمد بقاءها من تقاليد بالية تتسلط على الجموع و العقول و تصبح لها قوة قاهرة لأي تفكير فردي حر

يحتفي الأمريكيون بهذه الرواية بشكل لايصدق⭐
. . فهي الرواية الوحيدة التي تصلح ليقرأها المرء في العاشرة..ثم يقرأها سنويا و تمنحه شيئا جديدا

What sort of a book is Huckleberry Finn? It’s often been marketed as a “boy’s book,” a juvenile adventure. Though it opens that way, it’s content soon reveals something much darker. The book is full of grim realities. Huck is abused by his drunken father, who goes so far as trying to kill him in a drunken fit. There are several casual murders (the book has a surprisingly high body count), deadly feuds, attempted lynchings, and dangerous and unscrupulous confidence men. That’s all on top of what the book reveals of the casual cruelty and inhumanity in the everyday functioning of slavery.

Huckleberry Finn is America’s Candide, a brutal satire of the American South, all cloaked in innocence. Mark Twain was the cleverest, subversive wit this side of Voltaire. From the mouth of his young narrator he casually dismembered the religious, social, and political conventions of the slave holding South, all seemingly without Huck being aware of what he said. Many of its most wicked burns are delivered as throw away lines, as when Huck said, “He never charged nothin’ for his preachin’, and it was worth it to.” With an ah shucks grin, Twain eviscerated his native culture with his satirist pen.

Unfortunately, Tom Sawyer ruined the satire. Early in the book Tom served a useful purpose. Huckleberry used him in introducing himself to the reader, and he served as an effective means of misdirection, lolling the reader into the expectation that this is just another silly entertainment rather than the dark satire it really is. Throughout the story references to Tom Sawyer provide a sort of running irony — Huck credits Tom as the mastermind of dangerous adventure, despite the fact that Huck is cleverly dealing with real life dangers, while Tom’s wild schemes are all a boy’s play acting imagined fantasies. It’s the equivalent of Voltaire repeating that this is the best of all possible worlds. Yet, when Twain came to end his book, he lost his nerve, and Tom Sawyer became his cheat. The dark satire he had been writing had no possible happy ending. Happy endings didn’t come to run away slaves who failed to escape the South, nor to those who aided them. So, Twain pulled in Tom Sawyer to take charge of the final twenty percent of the tale. He abandoned his dark satire, and used Tom to end the book as a silly farce.

Huckleberry Finn would have been a much different book had Twain not lost his nerve. But as written, it is still a flawed masterpiece of American letters. Ernest Hemingway said that “All American literature comes from [it]…There was nothing before.” I agree. Huckleberry Finn is where real American literature began.

Pretty good, kinda silly - but I think that is what Twain was going for - 3.5 stars.

Twain is the king of the Yarn. Huckleberry Finn is a collection of outlandish tales all with lies and trickery at their heart. At the time of its release I am sure it became a bible for scoundrels and mischevious teens.

This book is controversial, and even frequently banned, because of its portrayal of black slaves and the use of the N-word. I venture into shaky ground here by offering my opinion as I am white, but I don't think I will cause too much trouble. I can accept that at the time of writing the words and language were fairly normal so as a time period piece it is true. However, I can't say I have read a book that takes place in that time period that so flippantly tosses the n-word around. Regarding banning of this book - I can definitely tell why some parents might be concerned about their kids reading this book. I think a lot of it depends on how it is being taught - I would hope the teacher would put an emphasis on explaining the language being used.

Summary:

- A good book
- Kind of silly
- A handbook for deception
- An understandably controversial reflection of the prejudices at the time it was written
- Some may need guidance regarding the the way racial differences are portrayed in this book.

High in the running with Moby Dick and it's companion novel Tom Sawyer to be the Great American novel.

Too Serious, Too Slow

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was fun while Huck Finn has a more somber tone. The pacing was also off and seemed to drag.

For the record, James by Percival Everett significantly departs from this book. Apparently, he too fell asleep in the last half of the book and decided to take the story in a different direction.

The Green Light at the End of the Dock (How much I spent):
Hardcover Text – $99.99 on eBay
Audiobook – Free with Audible

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I really liked parts of this book -- Huck's escape from his father, the floating house, the Grangerford-Shepherdson feud, the Royal Nonesuch, and meeting Colonel Sherburn. However, a Reason.com deconstruction better explains how I felt about the end than I could:

So what's the problem? Only this: Twain's acknowledged masterpiece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, inspires almost universal ambivalence among its biggest fans. "It's the best book we've had," pronounced Ernest Hemingway in 1932. "All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since." Oh, but one more thing, counseled Papa: "If you must read it you must stop where...Jim is stolen from the boys [and imprisoned by a slave catcher]. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating."

As [Ron] Powers puts it, "Huckleberry Finn endures as a consensus masterpiece despite these final chapters" in which Tom Sawyer leads Huck through elaborate, ineffectual, and grotesque machinations to rescue the runaway slave from Tom's Uncle Silas (even worse, we eventually learn that Jim has in fact been free the whole time). Most critics feel that once Tom Sawyer shows up, Huckleberry Finn devolves into little more than minstrel-show satire and broad comedy that cheapens the deep, transgressive bond that has evolved between Huck and Jim.

All in all, I preferred The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which was shorter, lighter in tone, and written in the third-person -- Twain's first-person account of Huck Finn is often so verbose and meandering, an English teacher friend of mine refers to it as a "Twain wreck."

I had to read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in middle school, and I fervently wish that they had made us read Huck Finn instead. I mean, I understand why they didn't (giving middle schoolers an excuse to throw around racial slurs in a classroom setting is just asking for a lawsuit from somebody's parents), but Huck Finn is better. It's smarter, it's funnier, and Huck's adventures stay with you a lot longer than Tom's, because Huck's experiences were richer and more interesting, whereas The Adventures of Tom Sawyer could easily have been titled The Adventures of an Entitled Little Asshole.

If Tom had to go through half of what happens to Huck in this story, he'd be balled up in the corner crying after five minutes. The action of Huck Finn is set in motion when Huck's father shows up and decides that he's going to be responsible for his son now (the story picks up right where Tom Sawyer left off, with Huck and Tom becoming rich, hence Finn Sr.'s sudden involvement in his kid's life). Huck's father essentially kidnaps him, taking him to a cabin in the middle of nowhere and getting drunk and beating his son. Huck escapes by faking his own death (and it's awesome) and begins traveling up the Mississippi river. He runs into Jim, a slave who belonged to the Widow Douglas's sister. Jim overheard his owner talking about selling him, so he decided to run away and try to go north. Huck, after some hesitation, goes with him. From this point, the structure of the book closely mirrors Don Quixote: a mismatched pair of companions travels the country, having unrelated adventures and comic intervals. On their travels, Huck and Jim encounter con men, criminals, slave traders, and (in the best mini-story in the book) a family involved in a Hatfields-and-McCoys-like feud with a neighboring clan. The story comes full circle when Tom Sawyer shows up and joins Jim and Huck for the last of their adventures, and the best part of this is that Tom Sawyer's overall ridiculousness becomes obvious once we see him through Huck's eyes.

Huck is a great narrator, and I think one of the reasons I liked this book more than its counterpart was because it's narrated in first person, and so Huck's voice is able to come through clearly in every word. In addition to the great stories, there are also some really beautiful descriptions of the Mississippi river, as seen in this passage about the sun rising on the river:

"The first thing to see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line - that was the woods on t'other side - you couldn't make nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness, spreading around; then the river softened up, away off, and warn't black any more, but grey; you could see little dark spots drifting along, ever so far away - trading scows, and such things; and long black streaks - rafts; sometimes you could hear a sweep screaking, or jumbled up voices; it was so still, and sounds come so far; and by and by you could see a streak on the water which you know by the look of the streak that there's a snag there in a swift current which breaks on it and makes that streak look that way; and you see the mist curl up off of the water, and the east reddens up, and the river, and you make out a log cabin on the edge of the woods, away on the bank on t'other side of the river, being a wood-yard, likely, and pulled by them cheats so you can throw a dog through it anywheres; then the nice breeze springs up, and comes fanning you from over there, so cool and fresh, and sweet to smell, on account of the woods and the flowers; but sometimes not that way, because they've left dead fish laying around, gars and such, and they do get pretty rank; and next you've got the full day, and everything smiling in the sun, and the song-birds just going it!"

(also that was one single sentence. Damn, Mark Twain.)

A fun, deceptively light series of stories that's funny and sad when you least expect it. Well done, The List - you picked a good one, for once.




...why are you still here? The review's over.




Oh, I get it. You want me to talk about the racism, right? You want me to discuss how Huck views Jim as stolen property instead of a person and criticize the frequent use of the N-Word and say "problematic" a lot, right?

Well, tough titties. I'm not getting involved in that, because it's stupid and pointless, and I'm just going to let Mark Twain's introduction to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn speak for itself, and the work as a whole: "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot."

كله يدلع نفسه..بالعقل و بالاصول اوعى تدلعها زيادة
دايما بتفكرني هذه الأغنية ب هاكلبيري فين ذلك الصبي الأشقر المطالب للابد بحق الانسان في ان يكون ملكا لنفسه مهما كلفه ذلك من مشاق و صراعات

صبي افاق شريد.. يكره العمل المنتظم و الذهاب للمدرسة او الكنيسة !! لا يبغى سوى : حرية منفلتة بلا حساب او عقاب..فيه لمحات من بيتر بان الصبي الابدي
نصيبه من العلم محدود..و من التربية معدوم♨
..ترق له ارملة و تتبناه ..و لكنه يتبطر على حياة الدعة و الشبع المصحوب بالادب و النظام بالطبع..و يهرب مع عبد اسمر هارب. .ليلعبا لعبة الحياة الكبرى ..الصراع لنيل حريتك

و عبر رحلتهما في الميسيسيبي⛵
..يسخر توين بقلم لاذع لا يضاهى من تقاليد المجتمع الأمريكي بطبقاته.. من الكذب و الخرافات ..الجهل و التعليم..الثار و العبودية

قيمة الرواية تأتي من انها تفرق بين المبادىء الانسانية الصحيحة و القيم الزائفة التي تستمد بقاءها من تقاليد بالية تتسلط على الجموع و العقول و تصبح لها قوة قاهرة لأي تفكير فردي حر

يحتفي الأمريكيون بهذه الرواية بشكل لايصدق⭐
. . فهي الرواية الوحيدة التي تصلح ليقرأها المرء في العاشرة ..ثم يقرأها سنويا و تمنحه شيئا جديدا

129th book of 2020.

It All Starts Here

Hemingway famously said, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called 'Huckleberry Finn, It's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before.” It is not Hemingway’s best quote in my opinion, that, unrelatedly, goes to, “I drink to make other people more interesting.” But that’s beside the point – but does lead us into the beginning of Huckleberry Finn with his escape from his alcoholic father.

Though it is not my favourite quote of Hemingway, it could, quite possibly, be true. In Twain’s words I saw a number of other writers: Kerouac, Passos, Steinbeck, indeed, Hemingway himself. The book is American. In my annotated version it gives me information sourced from a letter of Twain’s to a friend, stating that Huckleberry Finn was imagined at 14 years old. So, instead of a young boy and a 450 pound Bengal tiger on a boat, we have a 14 year old American bohemian boy with “slave-runaway”, Jim. Race is the biggest theme in the novel, one that doesn’t ebb and flow, but one that pulses throughout, in every scene. I’ve seen people call this novel racist: they are wrong. Huck is, with lack of better word, a free-spirit – but being a young boy, his social understanding is that of his world (this world being 19th century Illinois), a world that is rightly scorned now. And despite having to balk often at the pages with the excessive use of derogatory terminology for Jim and the other slaves, there is a surprising amount of heart in the novel. Huck’s emotional journey, alongside his physical odyssey with Jim, is that of greater understanding and empathy. It is clear to see that he cares for Jim; even if he does so self-consciously, he is a product of his time – we can scorn that now, but we cannot understand what it is like to be brought up in 19th century Illinois. Tom Sawyer’s philosophies are slightly less pure. Huck’s opinions on Jim are centred around his mental journey and discussion into good and evil, right and wrong. One of the few poignant moments in the novel (without spoiling too much) is when Huck is given the chance to give up Jim’s position for a reward, and he chooses not to; his actions bring him inner conflict: They went off, and I got aboard the raft, feeling bad and low, because I knowed very well I had done wrong, and I see it warn’t no use for me to try to learn to do right. In the end he decides on this:

n  Then I thought a minute, and says to myself, hold on - s'pose you'd a done right and give Jim up; would you felt better than what you do now? No, then, says I, what's the use you learning to do right, when it's troublesome to do right and ain't no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same? I was stuck. I couldn't answer that. So I reckoned I wouldn't bother no more about it, but after this always do whichever come handiest at the time.n

Later in the novel Huck reflects, Human beings can be awful cruel to one another. Lift the shroud of race and what’s hidden beneath, quite simply, is the beauty of friendship and good.

Not Waving, But Drowning

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was a true adventure story – pranks, good-humour, boys living free and happy, and famously, gate-crashing their own funeral. My review descended into reminiscing of my years in the Scouts (Memory-Heavy Review Here), for that is where the novel took me. Though I expected the same from Huckleberry Finn’s tale – I was wrong. Twain was a humourist, which is ironically a funny term in itself. When reading this, one can remind themselves of that and smile, while they can. In fact, this novel echoed in my head to another brilliant American novel, Catch-22. Similarly to Heller’s satire on war, this tale made one laugh, before it made one stop. The most fitting example is the family Huck stays with briefly when he is separated from Jim. The family explain that they are in a feud with another family, though when it started and why have been long forgotten. As a boy I heard similar stories about countries, or old tribes, fighting but they couldn’t remember why – there’s something oddly funny about the idea of fighting about something you cannot remember. It is only funny for so long; a boy in the family explains that that year, two had died, one being a fourteen-year-old boy (Huck’s age, we now know) being shot off of his horse. The episode descends further into darkness. There were a surprising amount of murders and deaths in the novel, which made me realise that Tom Sawyer’s tale is for the young, and Huckleberry’s Finn’s tale is for the young who are rising from their youth.

Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn?

Tom is full of adventure; he is rash, arrogant (the way a child can be, without realising), well-read and brought up well too (in this sense, into a good family, with plenty of slaves and a more nurtured view compared to Huck’s). Is Twain saying, then, that it is by our nurture that defines our beliefs? We quite readily accept that in today’s world. In Golding’s world, boys are left long enough that they kill one another – and in Twain’s world, a boy is left long enough with a runaway slave that he starts to look closer.

nWhen I waked up, just at day-break, he [Jim] was setting there with his head betwixt his knees, moaning and mourning to himself. I didn’t take notice, nor let on. I knowed what it was about. He was thinking about his wife and his children, away up yonder, and he was low and homesick; because he hadn’t ever been away from home before in his life; and I do believe he cared just as much for his people as white folks does for their’n.

A moment of empathy strikes Huck. And though some of the things Huck says seem hypocritical, with the word choice especially, one must remember how normal it was to speak so – and that Huck’s views were actually breaking through that.

Huck’s tale is filled with disgust for the world. There are murderers, thieves, frauds… And there’s Huck and Jim on their raft, drifting through the ether, caught in the middle of Twain’s wildly humorous but terrifying America. Like the old saying, “We laugh so we don’t cry.” In this sense, Huck’s journey echoes again, to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. And I start to sense the novels coming out of Huckleberry Finn like branches from a tree – and from those branches, even more: from Lee’s novel, another branch spawns with Tartt’s The Little Friend, from Catch-22 comes Vonnegut novels like Slaughterhouse-Five. And as I have said, even Hemingway himself, Nick Adams bursting from the tree, like a modern Huckleberry Finn (which is to say, is it, that Hemingway is like a modern Huckleberry Finn?). I start to wonder. Could it honestly be that American fiction has bloomed from this novel? That they all stand on the shoulders of this fourteen-year-old boy, lying on his back on the raft, smoking or snoozing, thinking how You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft. That the whole of American literature is sat on that raft with him – and Huckleberry Finn adores it.

3.5

"There warn't no home like a raft, after all."

I mean, at the beginning there's a notice that reads "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot." How am I supposed not to fall in love, pray tell?

This book swarms with key issues of Twain's -today's- America -world-, all properly backed up by irresistible humour and irony. As I've said elsewhere before, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is another of those books that, in my opinion, with their sole existence make the world a better place.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is considered one of the “great American novels” if not the “Great American Novel”. Hemingway described it as follows, “All modern American literature comes from Huck Finn. It’s the best book we’ve had. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.”

William Faulkner wrote of the author – “In my opinion, Mark Twain was the first true American writer, and all of us since are his heirs, we descended from him.”

Having not read this book since I was Huck’s age – thirteen or fourteen – and in all honesty not remembering much of it, I pulled it off the shelf. Two things struck me as I “re-read” the novel – first this is not a sequel to Tom Sawyer, although it is a raucous, no holds barred adventure with hi-jinx and capers. Secondly, it reminded me of a Dickens’ novel, i.e. a multi-layered social commentary cleverly told through the characters’ voices/stories - Which when I read this as an adolescent flew right over my head - and was probably Twain’s goal.

The book’s plot is straightforward. After finding his current situation untenable – Huck’s vagrant drunk of a father is back in town – our hero fakes his death – interestingly Huck and Tom Sawyer pull a similar stunt in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer – and hits the road – which in this case is the Mississippi River. Coincidentally, within days Huck meets up with escaped slave Jim – whom he knows - and the two “team up” as they make their way south on the “Big Muddy”.

Along the way our heroes meet up with a host of entertaining characters, including two grifters/con-men claiming to be European royalty; meander into one “situation” after another in one small southern town after another; all the while “pretending” to be anyone but themselves – they are both escapees after all. Huck and Jim also bond, and granted there is more than a little paternalism in Huck’s perspective, he and Jim still “connect”.

If there is a fault with this book, it’s the last 75 pages or so. Tom Sawyer shows up and the story becomes borderline farce as he and Huck concoct schemes to spring Jim who has been captured.

Still worth the (re)read and I’ll leave it to the experts as to exactly where on the “List of Great Novels” this book resides.

Whether Clemens intended it as such, it is still the quintessential American novel. We still are working on some of the issues he noted and every time I read it, I find something new.