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A review by quisby
The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton
5.0
Moby Dick, beside this giganotosaurus of a book, adopts the size of a fairly unremarkable minnow. Ostensibly a treatise on a humoristic imbalance, the Anat. of Melan. quickly emerges as an encyclopedic, bilingual, Rabelaisian treatment of human nature in toto.
In the opening section, addressed To the Reader, Burton manages to quote Seneca, Plutarch, Juvenal, Horace, Perseus, Pliny, Macrobius, Lucian, Plautus, Ovid, Philostratus, Virgil, Theophrastus, Cyprian, Lactantius, Lucretius, Plato, Josephus, Sidonius Apollinaris, Aesop, Diodorus Sicilus, Virtruvius, Alelian, and Porphyry (inter alia, no less).
Roughly a fourth of the text is in Latin, most of which consists of direct or paraphrased excerpts from classical authors (although Burton also employs Latin for grosser anatomical details and anecdotes involving interspecies sexual liaisons (which do come up)).
The constant interplay of Latin and English feels like a sort of Elizabethan Click and Clack, a sing-song dialogue that propels the book forward with incredible speed — remember, this is supposedly a medical text.
The result is a flabbergasting medical treatise cum philosophical tract cum thought journal cum novel in dictionary form cum mass quotational collage cum biblical redux.
This book defies generic reduction. It's an urtext for Finnegans Wake, but even that's mostly inaccurate. Calling it a proto-internet might be better. Maybe, if Shakespeare had written a modernist novel, this is what it would look like. Biblical redux works too.
The whole somehow exceeds the sum of its parts to such an extent that I'm still puzzling over why I liked the dang thing so much. It's genuinely unsettling. But unsettling in a starscape-on-a-clear-night kind of way. It's probably the most personable book I've ever read, like an old man relating telling stories to children on his knees, complete with hyperbolized wisdom, temper tantrums, passionate diatribes and a good joke or two.
Although Burton compares himself to laughing Democritus (and elsewhere acknowledges some affinity to weeping Heraclitus) his laughter and tears are ultimately kind. Laughter comes with a wink, tears mix with a chuckle, and the reader is left with an overwhelming sense of love, peace and hope for mankind.
In the opening section, addressed To the Reader, Burton manages to quote Seneca, Plutarch, Juvenal, Horace, Perseus, Pliny, Macrobius, Lucian, Plautus, Ovid, Philostratus, Virgil, Theophrastus, Cyprian, Lactantius, Lucretius, Plato, Josephus, Sidonius Apollinaris, Aesop, Diodorus Sicilus, Virtruvius, Alelian, and Porphyry (inter alia, no less).
Roughly a fourth of the text is in Latin, most of which consists of direct or paraphrased excerpts from classical authors (although Burton also employs Latin for grosser anatomical details and anecdotes involving interspecies sexual liaisons (which do come up)).
The constant interplay of Latin and English feels like a sort of Elizabethan Click and Clack, a sing-song dialogue that propels the book forward with incredible speed — remember, this is supposedly a medical text.
The result is a flabbergasting medical treatise cum philosophical tract cum thought journal cum novel in dictionary form cum mass quotational collage cum biblical redux.
This book defies generic reduction. It's an urtext for Finnegans Wake, but even that's mostly inaccurate. Calling it a proto-internet might be better. Maybe, if Shakespeare had written a modernist novel, this is what it would look like. Biblical redux works too.
The whole somehow exceeds the sum of its parts to such an extent that I'm still puzzling over why I liked the dang thing so much. It's genuinely unsettling. But unsettling in a starscape-on-a-clear-night kind of way. It's probably the most personable book I've ever read, like an old man relating telling stories to children on his knees, complete with hyperbolized wisdom, temper tantrums, passionate diatribes and a good joke or two.
Although Burton compares himself to laughing Democritus (and elsewhere acknowledges some affinity to weeping Heraclitus) his laughter and tears are ultimately kind. Laughter comes with a wink, tears mix with a chuckle, and the reader is left with an overwhelming sense of love, peace and hope for mankind.