The Annotated Huckleberry Finn

أحب سخرية مارك توين، لذا وددت أن أقرأ أشهر رواياته "مغامرات هكلبري فِن"
ليست مرتبطة بجزأها الأول مغامرات توم سوير
وهو ما شجعني على البدأ فيها بدلأ من أن أنتظر شراء "مغامرات توم سوير
أعجبني ثلثي الرواية الأولين مغامرات النصابين الملك والدوق
لكن الثلث الأخير كان أصغر من سني كثيرا ربما إنبهرت به وأنا عندي 12 سنة مثلا

I knows I's gywne teh like tis book
A delightfully funny and nostalgic piece of writing. This is my first Mark Twain and it will most certainly not be my last.

Secondhand Nostalgia
Although my grandfather grew up in the 1940s and not 1840s, there is an undeniable similarity in their childhoods. Both by grandfather and Huck are masterful storytellers who convey a tenable sense of freedom - stories that elicit nostalgia in me although I have not experienced them myself. Both convey a time that was simpler, and yet in many ways infinitely more complex than our own.

Mark's a funny guy
I believe that the relationship between Huck and Jim is very well executed. It is not simple. A major theme of the novel is that Huck's religious and societal beliefs (going to hell for helping an escaped slave) and his moral beliefs (that helping a slave is the right thing to do) clash. The way in which Twain portrays this clash is not only masterful, but shrouded in humour as Twain is wont to do. What I adore about Twain's humour is that it is still relevant and funny more than 100 years later.

Old kids on the Block
I also feel that Twain writes children very well. I could immediately relate to Huck's out-of-the-box thinking and Tom's outrageous answers to solving problems. Twain reminds us that although Huck is faced with immense challenges that question his moral fibre and very place in society, he is just a kid. Mark has a penchant for writing child characters as well as Stephen King.

Hobbit's got a voice
The conversations between Jim and Huck had me crying with laughter. This was enhanced by Elijah Woods' narration of the audio book. His intonation, emphasis and accents were all well-timed and well-executed. This hobbit did good.

Racism and Huck Finn
What I find interesting about this book is that it was initially banned for being too liberal and pro-black. Several decades later, it is considered racist and slandering. I will not comment on this - only that it reveals a lot about how a society develops. Always take a classic with a grain of salt. Misogyny and racism are an inevitability in many classics and should be taken as a period piece and not a criticism for social justice. Jim's also the result of the times - he may seem a caricature, but I feel that we won't do Jim justice if we don't look at his situation as well as his deep meanderings on life that are often masked as humour and satire.

The only reason I did not give Huck Finn 5 stars is that the book degraded in quality by the last quarter. I felt that it was being drawn out and forced by then.

All round, Huck Finn is a solid classic and I'll be happy to return to Huck's world when I read Tom Sawyer.

Many many meta levels of analysis can be done on this book which is why it's one of the monster great novels. For me, when I first read it in elementary school, I experienced the welcome shock that a kid could be an independent actor working against the mores of church and society. Between this book and Sherlock Holmes I discovered books can free your mind from the chains of what people say you should think and how you should act vs. what you see and hear and experience in the real world.

The first time I read 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' I was in the fifth grade, and it gave me a lot more insight into my own family even though we were as far from the South as is New York City in time and place.

I personally gained much valuable insight into frauds, scams, situational piety, and what can only be defined as the pure social stupidity and greedy foolishness of people as seen from a viewpoint as clear-sighted as one like the author's, Mark Twain. I suppose having been a Mississippi riverboat pilot and a journalist, among other jobs, gave Twain much eye-opening fodder for the adventures of his fictional protagonists. People have not changed since the time of 1885 when Twain published this book. Is there any other author with such insight into the Art of the Con when done by a real criminal or thought of by such a child as Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn's best friend and mentor?

I learned a lot how emotions can be played and lies done by reading the two interlinked books (this book is the sequel to the previous book featuring Tom Sawyer - The Adventures of Tom Sawyer) although I couldn't articulate my newfound knowledge as a kid. To me, they are survival manuals for kids on how to deal with parents and other authority figures who tend to obfuscate Reality and insist on mysterious customary rituals of behavior. Now I can see how even more apt and essential a manual of "how to play and prey on human nature for fun and profit" Twain's books are for adults as well, especially appropriate in the 21st century! Hello, cable news and celebrity gossip! Hello, Twitter and talk radio! Hello, internet marketing and ad targeting strategies! Hello television, YouTube and movies! However, just because society is full of manipulated emotions doesn't mean emotions are ALL based on falsified sources! 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' would not be a great book if it didn't also include the simple everyday expressions of heartfelt sentiment, support and the honest morality of family and friends, beneficial and worthy to living. Plus, plenty of humorous fun!

The main narrator, Huckleberry Finn, is a homeless 'street' kid with an unorthodox childhood. He runs away at around age 13 or 14 years of age from St. Petersburg, Missouri, on a raft with another runaway, Jim, an adult slave. While floating up and down the Mississippi and various near tributaries, they stop only out of necessity in little and large towns, trying to avoid authorities who would put both Jim and Huckleberry into slots of legal civilization neither would be happy in. Huckleberry is escaping his dangerous alcoholic father while Jim is hiding out because he was threatened with being sold by his owner, Miss Watson, to owners reputed to murder slaves through torturous field work.

Huckleberry was completely stressed out when his alcoholic sh*t of a father kept him prisoner in a cabin after kidnapping him from a more stable adoptive home. Pap is having alcohol-induced psychotic breaks, and he has nearly killed Huckleberry several times with beatings and trying to shoot Huckleberry. So Huck fakes his death with pig's blood and an axe before Pap comes back from a drunk and escapes his father's shack through a hole Huck cut in the wall. He has a canoe which he loaded up with supplies, and he hides out on an uninhabited island. With a few days, he discovered Jim is also hiding out on the island!

A search party lands on the island looking for Jim. The two runaways hide in a cave temporarily, but they realize they have to leave. Jim or Huckleberry have little faith in how civilization and its laws works for people like them, so they join up in escaping Law, Civilization and Order, and the people who legally owned both of them.

There are 21st-century real-life analogs of all the 19th-century characters Huck and Jim meet on their trip down the Mississippi River walking about today - bankers, real estate brokers, family relatives, talk-radio DJs, politicians, religious and wellness gurus, criminals, feuding neighbors, and lowlifes, to name a few. I also recognized some of the scams (many successful) that a couple of criminals attempt on towns along the shores of the Mississippi River. Huck and Jim are forced to accommodate the bad guys for awhile on their raft, as the two cons intimidate and blackmail Huck and Jim with exposure as runaways. Despite the dangers the bad guys cause for the heroes, there is plenty of humor and an education in scams in store for Huck, Jim and us readers!

Will our heroes find freedom from Civilization? Will Huck overcome his qualms at the "immorality" of helping his friend Jim escape, since he has been taught he will go to hell for stealing "property"? Will Tom Sawyer rescue his friend in the manner all of us have come to love?

I'm not telling, gentle reader.

Readers should be aware the book has real Southern dialects and racial language typical of Southerners in the 19th century, some of which is particularly offensive today. Nonetheless, I recommend this book. Twain may or may not have had racist beliefs, but he definitely did not like slavery. Whenever he writes of it, there is a satirical tone towards White attitudes of slavery, and he always includes scenes showing the contradictions of what society believed about Black people and the actual humanity and heroism of Black people. Perhaps today we more sophisticated types would call the inclusion of 'magic negro characters' sadly misdirected liberalism, but for the times this book was written, I can only see it as a positive.

I read this book a few years ago and didn't enjoy it all that much. The only reason I finished it was because it was part of my course work. However, I think listening to the audiobook this time around was a better experience. The narrator Robin Miles has done a good job of narrating it in the southern dialect although I feel the language is a bit disturbing and unsuitable for a book that was popularised as children's fiction.

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher Thomas Nelson for the audio ARC of the book. The audiobook was published on 30th June 2020.

Rating:⭐⭐⭐

I read this in high school and reread it earlier this year after reading Percival Everett's James. I liked Evertt's revision better than Twain's original. I also liked Huck's adventures more than Tom's. Tom, to me, is an amoral little scamp who has a lot of growing up to do, whereas Huck is a mostly good kid who tries his best but is limited by his immaturity. I always think of Tom as growing up into the epitome of a Wall Street super jerk and Huck as growing up into a respectable doctor working for Doctors Without Borders. Tom is the kid who could've done better in school but never applied himself. Rather, he used his brains to get ahead outside of school and is wildly successful at stepping on/over others or tricking them into letting him to the front of the line. Huck, in comparison, hates doing the work just as much but eventually buckles down.

It might be unfair to compare them as such, but given Huckleberry is a sequel to Tom, it's hard not to - kind of the way all my brothers' teachers compared them to me when we were younger, just because they'd taught me first.

This second volume in the Tom & Huck duology has Huckleberry Finn narrate his own story.

We follow the boy after the events from the previous book (though reading both isn't strictly necessary). He's come to have quite a sum of money that is being kept for him by responsible and nice people. However, "Pap" (his drunkard father) wants a piece of the pie so to speak. Thus, trouble starts early on.
We follow Huck when he tries to break away from the strict life of having specific times for breakfast and supper and school and wearing nice clothes and being clean. We follow him when he actually enjoys school or at least wants to attend in defiance of his alcoholic father. And we follow him to a not quite as deserted island as he thought. From there, we embark on a journey with him and Jim through the American South along greater and smaller rivers, encountering all kinds of folk and living through all kinds of dangers.
Through his eyes we get a close look at the people around him, at the social system, at slavery, at small and big crimes, at friendship.

Many people apparently have a problem with the slang Mark Twain used here. However, the slang is authentic (yes, I checked). And yes, back then black people were slaves and did get called the n-word. So characters in this book owning slaves or calling them the n-word - while not being nice or right - is realistic. I hate it when people demand books get rewritten because they no longer work with our current/modern sensitivities. You can't edit history and you also shouldn't because that way you never have to confront the mistakes of the past and can therefore not grow as a society.
The funny thing about my comment above? The author not only created an authentic tale about the American South of that era, he was himself a staunch critic of slavery and used many moments in this and the previous book to show that clearly, too. So people are actually demanding to edit someone who tried to change society for the better. Oh, the irony.

Anyway. Yes, this is stronger (more political, just as critical of religion, less mellow) than the previous book. Most people even say this isn't YA (unlike Tom's tale). I disagree. They are both YA. But Mark Twain wet people's appetite with a more innocent story before whacking them over the head with this one and making sure they learnt their lesson. Young readers can definitely handle this despite the less innocent tricks and learn a great deal besides (not just about how to be a successful con man *lol*).
Sure, it's dark-ish, what with the domestic violence, alcoholism, the failures of the judicial system, slavery, ... but we also get the nice and relaxing (almost soothing) descriptions of the woods and the river as well as Huck's often funny take on society and religion or his superstitions that make you chuckle or even laugh outright just as much as the tricks he likes to play.

As mentioned in my very first status update, I read this Word Cloud Classic together with the audiobook and the audio version was narrated by Elijah Wood. I'd have to look up where the little hobbit originally is from, but I don't think he's from the American South so I can tell you that I was very pleasantly surprised when hearing his performance as the southern accent isn't the easiest and he did a great job.

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."

"That is just the way with some people. They get down on a thing when they don’t know nothing about it."

What makes a classic? A question I have had to ask myself repeatedly over the last few days, after students in Grade 8 received the task to come to the library and "check out a classic to read". There was a list with the usual suggestions, but students ventured out and started to explore shelves, and then came to me with a wide range of books, repeating the question:

"Is this a classic?"

Why did I turn down the diary of a wimpy kid, they wanted to know, and accept Huckleberry Finn, even though it was so much harder to understand, and also, they had heard it was racist?

All good questions, and I was careful not to give a too categorical answer. The last thing I wanted was for them to make the connotation that a classic is a boring must, while a "good book" is what the teachers and librarians would refuse.

Difficult.

I found myself talking about the Count of Monte Cristo and Voldemort, about Tom Sawyer and Oliver Twist in comparison to Harry Potter, and I made a case for trying to get through parts of Huckleberry Finn even though the language is challenging, mainly because it contains exactly the message that people become unfair "when they don't know nothing about it".

I found myself talking about discovering other times, other societies, other ideas of justice and hierarchy, and I talked about living in the mind of someone other than oneself. Imagine Huckleberry on that raft on the Mississippi, I said. Imagine him being in a conflict between the values he was taught and the humanity he discovered together with his fellow human, who happened to be a black man in distress. Which concept of life would be stronger?

Imagine a situation in which you would have to make a choice between what you are taught and what you perceive?

"That's interesting", a student said.

Another one replied:

"Yeah, but it really is racist too!"

And I thought:

"That makes a classic. A book that can still inspire discussions in a school library some 135 years after its initial publication."

So, dear Harry, I hope that in the year 2133, some librarian will tell students that you are a classic hero, still worthy of their attention, even though your worldview may seem a bit dated and out of touch with their perception of reality! And just imagine all the Voldemorts we will have had to fight to make sure there are still school libraries and reading kids by then!

To Huck and Harry!