"The Man Who Was Thursday" NotReview

[packbat]

Don't you love turn-of-the-century* prose? In just the first chapter of The Man Who Was Thursday (copyright 1908), even if I restrict myself to mere praise of vocabulary, there's "empyrean" (refering to the heavens, more prosaically named the sky), "navvies" (an antiquidated slang term chiefly referring to construction workers), and greatest of all "flâneur" (that unique term of Baudelaire's† describing the detached gentleman observer who walks about the city). And, of course, Colney Hatch‡ (that metonymic term for a mental asylum which is so much more colorful than the standard phrase).

I'm going to enjoy this one. I can tell.

* By which I mean turn-of-the-20th-century. This latest turn was of the millenium.
† Wikipedia, I admit.
‡ Wikipedia again.