The Histories Of Gargantua And Pantagruel

Six unlikely heroes must save a magical realm from dark sorcery in this delightful fantasy from New York Times–bestselling author Alan Dean Foster. Wizard Susname Enyndd was the Gowdlands’ kingdom’s most powerful protector. Then the sinister Khaxan Mundurucu and a band of goblin-warlocks from the Totumakk Horde conjured up a curse that reduced the wizard to ash and leeched all the color from the land. But with Enyndd’s death came a spell that enchanted his six familiar pets—the terrier Oskar, the songbird Taj, the boa Samm, and the cats Cezer, Cocoa, and Mamakitty—transforming them into human beings capable of wielding magic. Now, the six companions must embark on a quest into a rainbow to find the one thing that can lift the evil curse: the White Light. As they travel through myriad colorful kingdoms while avoiding deadly enemies, each must learn how to control their magical powers—and try to get the hang of being human. But at the end of the rainbow, the heroes discover an unsettling truth about their quest—and about the magic that can bring about the end of everything . . . “[An] action-packed fantasy, one that might have come straight from the vaults of Disney.” —Publishers Weekly “Humor and wit enliven this quest-tale.” —Library Journal

Rabelais's hilarious, scabrous and often scatological fantasy of life amonth the monks and friars of sixteenth-century France remains a satirical and comic classic. A great broth of a book in which every conceivable literary form is parodied and every human desire satirized. But under the comedy there is a serious purpose, for Rabelais also enspouses a positive view of life in which tolerance, goodness, understanding and wisdom are opposed to dogmatism, pride and cruelty. The book is here presented in the classic translation by Urquhart and Motteux.

With his birth itself a monumental exploit in itself, it is clear that the giant Pantagruel is destined to great things, and the novel that bears his name chronicles his the remarkable life of the exuberant youth: from his voracious reading habits to his escapades with the knave Panurge and his prowess in battle. The second work in this volume deals with the history of his father Gargantua, whose biography is equally if not more outlandish and larger than life.But these bawdy and boisterous tales, with their fixation on food and faeces, are not just entertaining yarns, as Francois Rabelais, one of the foremost humanists of the sixteenth century, parodies medieval learning, lambasts the established church authority and develops his own ideal visions for the ordering of society.

Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais, was first published in the mid sixteenth century. A work of satirical and fantasy fiction, it tells the story, over 5 books, of two giants; Gargantua and his son Pantagruel as they travel through various lands. On their travels, they meet people on Tool Island, who are so fat, they slit their skin to let the fat puff out; the sexually prolific Semiquavers; the Furred Law-Cats, who imprison them; and, the Chitterlings, who attack them. Containing much vulgarity and wordplay, it was viewed as obscene by some, and treated with suspicion during a social age of religious oppression.

Consisting of five books, this masterpiece is Rabelais' magnum opus. It chronicles different events in the life of Gargantua and his son Pantagruel. Using his learned wit and biting satire as a facade, Rabelais discusses several serious issues. The apparent humour and brilliant use of language offers pure reading pleasure. Entertaining and profound!

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The dazzling and exuberant moral stories of Rabelais (c. 1471-1553) expose human follies with their mischievous and often obscene humour, while intertwining the realistic with carnivalesque fantasy to make us look afresh at the world. Gargantua depicts a young giant, reduced to laughable insanity by an education at the hands of paternal ignorance, old crones and syphilitic professors, who is rescued and turned into a cultured Christian knight. And in Pantagruel and its three sequels, Rabelais parodied tall tales of chivalry and satirized the law, theology and academia to portray the bookish son of Gargantua who becomes a Renaissance Socrates, divinely guided in his wisdom, and his idiotic, self-loving companion Panurge.