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A review by tomleetang
Jacques the Fatalist by Denis Diderot
4.0
"What sort of community did they find inside?
Mixed.
What did people say?
Some truth and lots of lies.
Were there any clever people?
Where are there not clever people? There were also a lot of people asking impertinent, tom-fool questions whom everybody avoided like the plague."
All books dialogue with a reader to some extent; this one just does so more directly, like an acquaintance who insists on clasping you to him while chastising your assumptions about the story he is telling you. It reads like an oral narrative put to paper, with a narrator who keeps getting distracted or interrupted by his hypothetical listener.
This book may not be for everyone, but I do have a soft spot for playful novellas that toy with storytelling conventions (though at the same time knowing that writers were engaging in postmodern-like games even before modernism does make one despair slightly of coming up with anything truly innovative).
Diderot's metafictional tale takes the framing narrative common to works like The Canterbury Tales and the Decameron and teases the reader by creating stories within stories - many of them bawdy episodes involving cuckolding and seduction. In doing this he critiques the literary conventions of his age, but his observations are just as applicable today.
As its title suggests, Jacques the Fatalist is also about fatalism and free will. Are we merely at the whim of some plan 'written on high'? The titular Jacques wavers between accepting fate with equanimity and trying to actively mould his future - on some occasions he claims to be philosophical about following the whims of fortune, but he still can't help trying to influence it on others. My interpretation of this was that, regardless of whether there is a god or some other mechanism of the universe driving our actions, humans can't help but try and influence their fate - and whether or not this has any effect is immaterial, because it means we continue to engage in the act of living with vigour rather than passivity.
I'll finish with a line which surely should be a contestant for most amusing sex euphemism:
"One of the teachers, Premontval, fell in love with his pupil, and in the midst of propositions concerning solid bodies inscribed within a sphere, a child was born."
Mixed.
What did people say?
Some truth and lots of lies.
Were there any clever people?
Where are there not clever people? There were also a lot of people asking impertinent, tom-fool questions whom everybody avoided like the plague."
All books dialogue with a reader to some extent; this one just does so more directly, like an acquaintance who insists on clasping you to him while chastising your assumptions about the story he is telling you. It reads like an oral narrative put to paper, with a narrator who keeps getting distracted or interrupted by his hypothetical listener.
This book may not be for everyone, but I do have a soft spot for playful novellas that toy with storytelling conventions (though at the same time knowing that writers were engaging in postmodern-like games even before modernism does make one despair slightly of coming up with anything truly innovative).
Diderot's metafictional tale takes the framing narrative common to works like The Canterbury Tales and the Decameron and teases the reader by creating stories within stories - many of them bawdy episodes involving cuckolding and seduction. In doing this he critiques the literary conventions of his age, but his observations are just as applicable today.
As its title suggests, Jacques the Fatalist is also about fatalism and free will. Are we merely at the whim of some plan 'written on high'? The titular Jacques wavers between accepting fate with equanimity and trying to actively mould his future - on some occasions he claims to be philosophical about following the whims of fortune, but he still can't help trying to influence it on others. My interpretation of this was that, regardless of whether there is a god or some other mechanism of the universe driving our actions, humans can't help but try and influence their fate - and whether or not this has any effect is immaterial, because it means we continue to engage in the act of living with vigour rather than passivity.
I'll finish with a line which surely should be a contestant for most amusing sex euphemism:
"One of the teachers, Premontval, fell in love with his pupil, and in the midst of propositions concerning solid bodies inscribed within a sphere, a child was born."