-----Original Message-----
>From: Juri Nummelin <
juri.nummelin@pp.inet.fi>
>
>I've read THE WANDERING JEW, but it was an old and
abridged Finnish edition
>from the fifties. Interesting nevertheless, but I
don't really see how he's
>important to the genre - I haven't as yet read Jess's
essay (which I know is
>wonderful). I'll post later if anything comes to mind
afterwards.
It's not, really, important to the genre--I mention Sue in
the context of 1840s social critique fiction.
Sue is dated, of course--most work from that long ago is--and
dependent on a good translator, but if you put yourself in
the right frame of mind, and accept that the prose style
isn't very good (by modern standards), you can find a great
deal that is enjoyable and even excellent in his work,
especially THE MYSTERIES OF PARIS and THE WANDERING JEW. The
latter work in particular is enormously fun in an outrageous,
over-the-top fashion. Thomas Disch put it well:
"The Wandering Jew has got, as the form demands, everything:
an heiress falsely accused of madness and incarcerated in a
lunatic asylum; a destitute hunchbacked seamstress of the
highest moral character hopelessly in love with a blacksmith
(who is a patriotic poet on the side); bloodthirsty panthers,
telepathic twins, debauchery, murder, suicide, duels,
supernatural manifestations, blazing passions, wild mobs, a
plague of cholera, scenes in Java and the Arctic, the _two_
best Reading-of-the-Will scenes that ever were, _and_
towering over all these attractions, the nastiest crew of
villains ever brought together in one book, presided over by
the fiendish, the insidious, the wholly diabolic Jesuit
priest and arch-hypocrite, Pere Rodin, who is hell-bent on
becoming the next Pope."
Sue more than many writers embodies a certain critical law:
too much is too much, but way too much is just enough.
jess
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