Wat een wonderbaarlijk boek! Het verhaal krijgt maar erg traag vorm, maar wat voor een personages spelen een rol: een pruikenmaker met nog slechts drie klanten, een Duitse zwendelaar en - natuurlijk - de oudheidkundige uit de titel.

De ontknopping van de al bij al flauwe plot - maar Scott kan bezwaarlijk clichématig worden genoemd! - neemt slechts enkele zinnen in beslag. De ruimte die dat laat, vult de bijzondere Jonathan Oldbuck, Laird of Monkbarns maar al te graag - en dat neem ik hem niet kwalijk.

Novela bien escrita que situa la acción en Escocia en 1800 on un desenlace final en las tres últimas hojas, que según vas leyendo ves que al autor no le va a dar tiempo a cerrar la novela, pero sí, va y la cierra magistralmente en un simple capítulo.
Divertido de leer.

My favourite comic novel about history and historians. Regency farce meets Romance, and dances joyfully along a windswept Scottish coastline.

It is really astounding how bad parts of this book are. Robert Louis Stevenson said that there have been few artists as "unconscious" as Scott, and that his writing was so unconscious and automatic that he could hardly be considered an artist at all. Stevenson meant those things as a compliment, but while sometimes Scott's spontaneous writing process succeeded amazingly— Rob Roy is maybe one of the five or ten most exciting books ever written—it also lead to a lot of failures. It is kind of funny to imagine Scott sitting at his desk wondering what would make an interesting book and deciding to go with a middle-aged man who is so obsessed with esoteric bits of Scottish history that he bores everyone around him almost instantly. You have to really respect Scott's commitment to his own artistic vision and his own creative process. He was nothing if not authentic. He really did not care what his readers would think and only wrote about what he himself enjoyed.

There are numerous issues with plot and structure. This book has perhaps the most uninspired marriage plot I've ever read, and the ending is so bizarre. Scott has a French ship invade Scotland alone for the sole purpose of bringing one of the characters back to the rest of the ensemble, and then we never even learn what came of the invasion.

Despite some enormous flaws including a burdensome length and a slow and nonsensical plot, there are some really well drawn out characters like beggar Edie Ochiltree, so it wasn't a complete waste of time to read it.

Feel like I can’t give it less than four stars as it’s Scott. Surprisingly funny, the mysteries are quite engaging. Great to see Scots language in literature, but it’s often quite abstruse and hard to follow, which is a pain when major plot points are conveyed via dialogue (a fair bit of re-reading prev pages). Took me about a month :’)

Scott's strength lies in juggling plotlines and (an explicit goal of his Waverly novels) in his capturing Scottish historical and cultural details in fiction. The main character, Oldbuck, is the titular antiquary, a collector and scholar of all things old, a good-hearted man a bit too ready to talk anyone's ear off and a bit too competitive about his collection--he is comic and ultimately endearing, but not quite heroic. The characters of most interest and most action are secondary to Oldbuck and move in and out of focus around him. There are a pair of young lovers, there is a scandal, there is buried treasure (or is there?)--and there is a seal, and it becomes the subject of a running gag that I LOVED. A seal running gag only outdone by Arrested Development. There is an audiobook on Librivox by an amateur reader--the quality of the reading is okay, but not great.

I have read Scott’s entire oeuvre, mostly in the course of the 1990’s. I am currently re-reading everything he wrote in chronological order. This is partly out of affectionate regard for an old friend, now twenty years dead, who possessed his collected works. On his deathbed he remembered that I had admired them, and his widow presented them to me in memoriam.

So now I have reached this novel and I enjoyed it a great deal the second time around, especially the white bearded mendicant Edie Ochiltree, Dousterswivel the splendidly drawn Dutch villain, and of course Jonathan Oldbuck, Laird of Monkbarns, who is the eponymous antiquary himself. True, Ochiltree’s portrayal is an idealised one of poverty and indigence, and Oldbuck’s misogyny – even if a lot of it is pretended – is pretty severe, even by the standards of the time. But there is a lot to enjoy. Not least is that Scott based Oldbuck on himself, and the scene where he gets terribly excited because he thinks he has discovered the remains of an ancient Roman fort – only to be brought down to earth abruptly when Ochiltree points out is an old drainage ditch he himself helped to dig – is very funny. It also reminds us of one of Scott’s most attractive features – he had the ability to poke fun at himself, and didn’t take himself too seriously.

The first half of the novel is really wonderful. The character of the Antiquary himself – Jonathan Oldbuck of Monkbarns – is an especially fine creation, almost of a Shakespearean or Dickensian quality. The book is worth reading just for him. Also memorable, however, are the wise old “gaberlunzie” (itinerant beggar) Edie Ochiltree, the financially embarrassed Sir Arthur Wardour, and the German occultist and charlatan Herman Dousterswivel. Scott gives us some great passages of dialogue and some enjoyable scenes – especially, as I said, in the first half of the novel.

The second half is problematic. The mysterious character of Lovel, who provides a lot of the motive force for the plot, disappears completely until just before the end. The female characters and the romantic angle are poorly developed. There’s a deus ex machina feel to the sudden appearance of Sir Arthur’s son. There are long, difficult passages in broad Scots dialect (or language if you insist) that made me feel like I was ramming my head against a wall. There’s also a running gag about Captain M’Intyre’s battle with a phoca (a seal, in Latin) that becomes as wearisome to the reader as it does to himself.

Finally, after all the drawn-out dialogue and slow maturing of the story, and despite a couple still-dangling plot threads, the novel is wrapped up with shocking abruptness, as if Scott had tired of it and wanted to move on to a new project.

3.5 stars but I’m rounding up for the sake of Jonathan Oldbuck.

Sir Walter Scott at his best!

It took me two goes - I started, then put it down and when I picked it up, I couldn't remember much about it. So I started again, and it seemed a much more interesting read the second time around. I struggled a bit with the Scots dialect bits - not that there are many of them, nor are they long, but I am someone who likes to know exactly what people are saying. I eventually started writing the translations in in pencil, as I do when reading German, and wished I had done that from the start - it also helps me to remember what words mean, so that I don't endlessly look up the same things.
I do enjoy Walter Scott's novels - he writes a good story, and I can understand why he was so popular in his day.I also enjoy reading a story written so long ago - none of the concerns of the 21st century author to deal with, just a good read!

Me ha encantado. Me lo he pasado en grande con las aventuras del anticuario y sus acompañantes. Echaba de menos este estilo de lecturas desde hace mucho.

Good ol' Novel, quaint little adventures with sort-of high stakes that you know will be resolved just fine and mostly everyone is alive and married by the end – we got saving a lady in a thunderstorm, assorted family skeletons, a duel (nobody dies), A Treasure and An Inheritance, some debts, and endless, endless commentary on everything that does and does not move from the titular Antiquary. Romanticism galore. And it's all spiced up by ~ the Scotland aesthetic ~ which the author dedicated considerable effort to, down to phonetically reproducing Scottish English so damn well I could not read the book on paper and could just about barely decode the audiobook.

Other notes:
- I have a pet theory that Tolkien has read this and Bilbo (and all the hobbits in general) was somewhat inspired by the Antiquary and Edie Ochiltree.
- I shudder to think what the translators had to do to handle the Scottish phonetics in other languages. Maybe an imitation of whatever the local country-side dialect is; there's so much of it you can't just brush it under the rug. Curious exercise.
- Did I say Romanticism galore? It's Romanticism galore. I can just see that guy from that painting ("Wanderer above the sea of fog") lurking in the background.