Matthew reviewed The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton
Surreal, thoughtful, hilarious.
5 stars
“The whole gave him a sensation, the vividness of which he could not explain, that Nature was always making quite mysterious jokes.”
G. K. Chesterton: The Man Who Was Thursday (2009, The Floating Press)
E-book
English language
Published Jan. 6, 2009 by The Floating Press.
The metaphysical thriller The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare, written by G. K. Chesterton in 1908, deals with a philosophical or theological anarchism; more a rejection of God than a rejection of government. The novel was described by Adam Gopnik as "one of the hidden hinges of twentieth-century writing, the place where, before our eyes, the nonsense-fantastical tradition of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear pivots and becomes the nightmare-fantastical tradition of Kafka and Borges."
“The whole gave him a sensation, the vividness of which he could not explain, that Nature was always making quite mysterious jokes.”
A very strange tale that turns from a crime story to a farce to an expressionist play to a Christian-philosophical treatise. It somehow manages to stay perfectly coherent throughout, with the unbelievable end scene a quite logical last step in a sequence of ever more outrageous scenes. Still, it leaves a somewhat sad feeling to see the fun and whimsy of the first half be pushed aside by the more serious and self-important realisations of the second, and the final impression is of a lecture received after setting out for a light distraction.