I just finished reading this, and I was quite impressed. Kind of a vaguely allegorical, folklore-based fantasy satire about a pawnbroker who travels to Cocaigne, Hell, Heaven, and other locales along the way, half-trying to win back his nagging wife from the supernatural being who, as a favor, took her away. Monstrously clever and full of ribald puns. Now I'm eager to try more of Cabell's fiction but am sad to find it's all out of print.
I'd never even heard of this book until this year, but then it seemed as if there were references to it everywhere I looked. I first noticed it while reading Darconville's Cat, by Alexander Theroux, in which he mentions a shelf in the U. VA library reserved for "pornographic" books like Tom Jones and Jurgen. But then I came across it again in a letter from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Edmund Wilson, and then Sinclair Lewis, and H.L. Mencken, and too many other places to mention. But aside from the Theroux, all of the references to it were from the 1920's, which struck me as odd, that there would be this novel seemingly everyone knew at one point and which no one knows today. I gather that much of its notoriety came from an obscenity case brought against it, but whatever the means by which it came about, I think the book's acclaim is well-deserved.
Anyway, anyone else read it? |
