"the man who was thursday"

http://www.ccel.org/c/chesterton/thursday/cover.gif

Likelier across these flats afar these sulky levels smooth and free
The drums shall crash a waltz of war And Death shall dance with Liberty;
Likelier the barricades shall blare slaughter below and smoke above,
And death and hate and hell declare that men have found a thing to love.

(chesterton i think considered c.doyle an idiot, which he possibly was)

This novel is really quite shit imo.

i am a ho for chesterton and cannot be swayed

where should i start with this guy? have a book of father brown stories and a falling-apart copy of this novel but have never read either.

I'm not done with it so I guess I can't speak authoritatively, but so far it seems awfully one-dimensional and preachy.

I was sitting on a bench once reading this book and a man walked past some small distance from me and without stopping said "WHAT ARE YOU READING?" so I held up this book with the cover pointing in his direction and without stopping he peered at it and said "THE MAN WHO WAS DADDY?" and I said "you have good eyesight!" and without stopping he said "DO I?"

early brown is great -- he got pretty formulaic by the fifth collection, plus his catholicism became a lot less weird and contrarian and challopsy as he got older and became a spokesman for a political line

thursday isn't really a novel, it's true, it's a conceit* -- a concept to hang cartoon paradoxes on -- but he writes great art nouveau sentences, and he loves the fact and sprawl of london as much as any writer i can quickly think of

*it's kind of a graphic novel in prose, very visual but in a stylised way

xp it's weird, i guess gkc is preachy -- he had a very definite belief system and ideology, though it's quite a peculiar one -- but this never bothers me the way it does with other preachy writers: i guess his actual religion is so distant from anything i stand for, and i think he's very funny

plus i love his subculture of bad poets and bad painters and fake aesthetes and faux anarchists, all strutting around and declaiming-- not least because he loves it too (one of the father browns is all about the Futurists, Marinetti and etc, tho not named directly, and he has them on the nose, what's exciting about them and what's ridiculous and what's fraudulent)

Huh, I just finished this. Hurting, keep going with it--it's a lot more ambiguous than it lets on at first, and you definitely don't want to miss the ending.

ambiguous? it's a barely-veiled christian apologia, and the end is more preachy than the rest of it put together. he tries to spice it up with some 'now we see thru a glass darkly' mysticism but i ain't buying. i suppose i have some sympathy for mark's graphic novel analogy, but even disregarding the religious aspect the utter absurdity of the whole thing annoyed rather than entertained me.

one of the things i like about father brown is how anti-mystical it always is: also anti the cult of rationality as something above and distinct from people with passions and temperaments and emotional logic and and and

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/610Gp7etDVL._SL500_.jpg
^Founding document of c20 geezaesthetics^

xxp
It's a little hard to discuss without giving it away, but I guess I meant ambiguity less in terms of Chesterton's intent than in the way he's structured his argument--how what appears to be an simple skewering of anarchism (what's reading to Hurting, rightly so, as "one-dimensional and preachy") ends up in an entirely different place. The way that the climax ratchets up the weirdness into full-blown psychedelia, for me, compensated for the ideology in fine CS Lewis fashion, but sure, ymmv.