A collection of insights and stories from Mark Twain's year in Europe, mostly in German and Switzerland. I thought it appropriate, since many of his adventures take place not far from where I'm living.

Really a collection of short stories, it at times feels awkward as, for whatever reason--the time period and writing style of the day, perhaps--Twain and his publisher try to tie it into a cohesive narrative. That said, many of the shorts are smugly amusing gems.

And even though it was written before a the defining recent history of the region, many of his observations still hold true today. The section about trying to learn German resonated particularly strongly for me.

Bonus: My edition has an introduction by Dave Eggers that is hilarious.

Forgot to add this book. I am reading it on my Kindle while vacationing in Canada. Had to leave my Cutting on Stone at home.

I downloaded this Twain classic as an appetizer for the new book Twain's Feast that is also waiting on my night table at home.

Twain's prose never disappoints the reader, but I have to admit that this was not my favorite work of his. I found that the overload of scenic descriptions did not keep me engaged in the work.

My favorite parts of the book were his detailed portrayal of "college" dueling and the list of all the American food that he missed while tramping around Europe.

Uneven in parts but oh so good. It's his travels through Europe "on foot." Some of the best bits: failure to see the sunrise in Switzerland, meeting other American tourists abroad, his friend Harris' Protestant dislike of Catholic glaciers.

Hilarious.

This was mostly funny, but in places he's trying too hard. For anyone who has traveled in Germany and/or Switzerland, there are some bits you can really relate to, even though this is from the late 1800s. It was quite enjoyable and conversational for the most part. However, for anyone who has ever studied German as a foreign language, be SURE to read Appendix D. It is on German grammar, and Twain surpasses himself with his wit here. It is extremely funny and quite enjoyable for anyone who's ever lost himself in the dregs of German articles and cases (a NIGHTMARE!).

Very interesting reading this on the heels of "The Dharma Bums' by Jack Kerouac. There is a key phrase from "A Tramp Abroad", "comparisons are odious" which has always struck me. It appears notably in both of these books. "A Tramp Abroad" is really interesting as a travelogue, a glimpse into 19th century Europe from a sharp and acute observer. Twain's descriptions of villages, hotel's, hotel customs, restaurant fare, mountains and mountain climbing, art and artists, architecture are joys to read. He delves into legends and local lore wherever he and his companion Harris go. He gets a bit tedious when he stretches a joke beyond need, but that's Twain. Overall , very enjoyable. Another comparison between Kerouac's book and this one. Twain being a wit, with a healthy edge and bite to his prose left me bit down. Kerouac's book was filled with joy and good feelings and left me feeling uplifted. one final note, I listened to both of these books as read by Grover Gardner, and that provided an interesting audible comparison as to the "voice" of the "narrator".

I finally got around to finishing this, basically after a complete year. I read half of it when I first got it from the library, then read the other half just recently.

I really enjoyed this, it's extremely funny and charismatic, and Twain has a certain self-awareness and narrative skill that pulls you along even in the most outlandish fictive scenarios. Everything is simultaneously unbelievable and believable. It helps, too, that he's a damn good writer. Incredibly tight, comic prose, that just flows like nothing else.

The first half is especially great, where he spends his time in Germany. I suppose I just relate to it more personally, have never visited the latter places (such as Switzerland). His essay in the appendix on the German language remains one of my favourite essays, ever since I read it for the first time (external to this book, it was what convinced me to read this in the first place!)

It's so damn funny. I have nothing but praise for it. Not a single moment did I find it boring, or loathsome, or troubling. It's just simply good reading.

Have to say there were spots when my attention wandered, but Appendix D where he criticizes the German language is priceless. Also, armchair mountaineers will appreciate the bits in France and Switzerland. Not so much the straight landscape description parts, but the bit where he attempts his own expedition is an amusing send up of mountain-climbing writing. (Boil the thermometer to make it work properly, or is it the barometer? Can't remember! Well never mind, we'll boil the thermometer to derive our altitude readings!)

I my have made the mistake of reading the Tramp before the Innocence, but I still enjoyed this book. Twain grabs you with is story telling and humor. I found myself shaking my head and sometimes laughing out loud at his stories. Having been to several destinations he describes, I took joy in reading his encounters. I love how they set out to tramp "walk" the tour, but virtually never walk. I will definitely be re-reading this book shortly as I enjoyed it and his ridiculous stories and stretching the truth. I love his sarcastic humor and wittiness (if you wish to call it that). I have to admit there were parts where I wish he would have grounded himself a bit and not exaggerated so much. I almost wished for more of a detail than a fairytale, but none the less I enjoyed this Mark Twain version of a travel guide and look forward to reading the first of his travels now.

Twain is indeed a funny man- something I never fully believed until reading this work!

Mark Twain's voice does seem the quintessential American voice. I haven't read The Innocents Abroad: or, The New Pilgrims' Progress, so I'm not sure if there is much difference, but I loved this book.

First is the voice, which is a strange, and hilarious, melange of the real Twain (I guess...), his protagonist (a fool), vivid descriptions of the sights, events, and people meet and seen on the way, and opinions that veer between complete humor and ironical common sense. And it is not just the narrator's voice that is so amazing: the Americans on the trip and completely hilarious, especially the young, very talkative student waiting to get sent home by his father.

Then there is the story itself. The normal travel book, a straight forward, descriptions of places gone and adventures often becomes boring. How to counter this? Why not mix in some completely associative anecdotes (check), make the narrator a complete liar (check), and search for oral stories wherever possible (check). So, within the telling of a trip and description of the places--and I for one am very keen to visit the Nekar and Alps now--are also the strange anecdotes about men talking to birds, and the German folklore told by the raft captain.

And finally I loved the complex play with fiction. What is real Twain here and what is not. What is an excuse to tell a very oral anecdote, and what is a more complicated plot. Stories where nothing happens are very popular in the Modernist tradition, I'm thinking of The Magic Mountain in relation to the Alps, but Twain finds a way to both do this, and not making it too slow and obvious for the reader. Nothing happens in this book, but we hardly notice since there are so many discursive plotlines and introductions and descriptions turning this way and that. Combine this with the strangely articulate and often difficult to place narrator, and you have a very original piece of fiction.

Hilarious first chapter (of Vol. 2), walking in the Swiss alps with his agent and courier. He sands his Agent Harris on ahead to scout out and report back, which he does after a few days, “all felt the heat in the climb up this very steep bolwoggoly, then we set out again…until from the Finsteraarhorn poured down a deluge of haboolong and hail” (11-13). Several pages feature such incomprehensible words. Clemens compliments his report, but asks about the words, turns out from Fiji, Zulu and Choctaw (bolwoggoly et al.) Clemens asks, “Why all this Choctaw rubbish?” Harris answers, “Because I didn’t know any French but two or three words, nor any Latin or greek at all.” Twain, “Why use foreign words anyhow?” Agent, “To adorn my page. They all do it.”(20)

Twain encountered the purported suicidal leaping-palace of Pontius Pilate, and the real St Nicholas, who’s buried in the church in Sachseln. “He has ranked for ages as the peculiar friend of children…He had ten of them, and when fifty years old he left them to become a hermit.” “St Nicholas will probably have to go on climbing down sooty chimneys Christmas Eve, forever, and conferring kindness on other people’s children, to make up for deserting his own”(24). During his hermit life, he partook of communion bread and wine once a month, but for the rest, he fasted. So Santa Claus was skinny. Guess Prof. Clement Moore’s account in 1823, the “right jolly old elf” displaced the thin saint.

Great stories of carriage rides slowly until reaching town, then faster “with the dust flying and the horn tooting”(30). Shocking to think stages drove faster through towns, to show off.

New to me, Twain’s words “Nooning,” which means lunch, and “alpenstock,” though that’s a climbing stick with an iron point. In the giant mountains, Twain finds rare cabins or hostels, near one shack— for builders of a stone house— he buys a beer “but I knew by the price it was dissolved jewelry”(74).

On one of the narrow paths by the side of a torrent when he heard a cowbell he hunted for “a place that would accomodate a cow and a Christian side by side.” That torrent was so fast he had his Agent race it, and “I made a trifle by betting on the log”(58).

When he gets to Florence, he assails Titian’s “Venus of Urbino” as the "foulest, the vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses,” which appallingly signals how very far from us was this writer who seemed so close in his humor. Even more astonishing his wondering that “Art is allowed as much indecent license today as in earlier times, but the privileges of literature in this respect have been sharply curtailed in the last eighty or ninety years [since Fielding and Smollett]”(267). Modernism— James Joyce and D.H.Lawrence-- would reclaim literary license.

Around 1880 when this was written, Europe had not yet learned to make coffee (Germans using chicory), nor heat their “vast and chilly tombs [homes]”; I experienced a virtually unheated room in Perugia where I had to take a hot bath to warm myself. No breakfasts, and the rest of the food he critiques, excepting fish and grapes. “Sometimes there is a tolerably good peach, by mistake…Roast chicken, as tasteless as paper…One vegetable, brought on in state usually insipid lentils, or indifferent asparagus…A monotonous variety of unstriking dishes”(261ff).

Now began Volume I, Twain takes up birdtalk: "A raven can laugh, just like a man" -- A Tramp Abroad (Vol I, p.23). Only one man understood birds, Jim Baker, a miner. "A jay is the best talker." One jay filled a hole in the roof, dozens of acorns, but it didn't fill. When he called over other jays, they saw all his acorns had fallen to the floor of the abandoned cabin, and they mocked him. A jay's mockery is a terrible thing. "Come here," he said, "hang'd if this fool hasn't been trying to fill up a house with acorns." Thousands of jays came, and each "fell over backward with laughter, and the next jay took his place and done the same"(p.31, Uniform edition, Vol I). Jays seldom use bad grammar. A jay's interests andfeelings cover the whole ground. "A jay hasn't got any more principle than a Congressman"(25).

He visits Heidelberg and its university, the students more relaxed than they were in nine years of gymnasium (grammar and HS). But dueling plays a big part, the five "corps" distinguished by the color of their caps. They duel with swords, with body protections, but their head vulnerable. They duel in a large open room with tables where they eat. "I had seen the heads and and faces of ten youths gashed in every direction by the keen two-edged blades, yet had not seen a victim wine"(50). "Newly bandaged students are a common spectacle in the public gardens of Heidelberg"(55). "It was of record that Prince Bismarck fought thirty-two of these duels in a single summer term"-- twenty nine of them after he earned the right to retire from fighting (after 3 duels, none tied, of acceptable length).
Twain becomes second in a duel with tiny silver pistols; he stands behind a huge man 35 paces from the other pistol-wielder. Two shots ring out--German law allows only one bullet--and the huge man collapses on Twain. No need for the two coroners, nor the hearses, but yes, the surgeons: no injuries to the principles, though Twain is injured by the weight falling on him: Surgeons diagnose, "I would survive my injuries"(75).

Visiting a production of Lear, he notes German order, no late patrons seating themselves, no applause to interrupt, though he thinks this makes acting lonelier. American applause can urge actors onward. He finds German love of opera unfathomable, because they applaud formerly great tenors who can no longer sing. "Why do we think Germans stolid? They are very children of impulse. They cry and shout and dance and sing." Their language is filled with diminutive endearments.

On that language, Twain appends his "Awful German Language" essay, where three months with tutors, a couple of whom die, results in his one perfect phrase, "Zwei bieren," two beers. He's amused that in German a woman is female, but a Weib, a wife is not. Neuter. He complains about compounding of words forming words not in the dictionary, some very long. An English woman is "die Enlangerinn" or "she-Englishwoman."