"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.

Comments

[chanlemur.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a regular word-mine. :)

[packbat.livejournal.com]

Well, in the first chapter, certainly. I think writers of this period were inclined to greater ornature in the beginnings of their books; I remember* Little Dorrit opened with a very poetic chapter about the disembarkation† of the passengers from a boat.

Of course, it is possible that I'm simply not noticing the unusual words past the first chapter. The plot picks up extremely quickly – were I given to superlatives (which I am), I would be inclined to say it brings the narrative ferocity of an Ian Fleming combined with the intellectual agility of a Dorothy Sayers, even while maintaining the facility of language one would expect from a contemporary of Jerome K. Jerome and near-contemporary of Charles Dickens (or even from Dorothy Sayers herself). But this isn't a review, and I haven't finished the book, so I won't. ;)

* By which I mean: "I vaguely remembered and checked online".
† Webster says it (http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?va=disembark); I would have written "disembarkment", myself.