On Why I Love Wodehouse! 😉
And how I ‘manifested’ my love for the legend!
#musings #lovelyreads
Horror fiction has never been my cuppa coffee oops my cuppa tea! 😊
Well, I’ve always loved reading stories that abound with light comedy, idyllic settings, cheerful characters with a zest for life, where the characters don’t have any harsh words for anyone, and at the same time, so chivalrous and romantic when it comes to adventurous escapades, with albeit light-hearted endings - stories that have always truly blue-ly resonated much with my reading sensibilities for long.
This takes me back to a host of lovely reads from my childhood days that have really helped me cultivate such a sensibility! Remember Tintin? He’s of that ilk! 😊
And that’s exactly ‘that something’ that makes P.G. Wodehouse so special for me. A real master-blaster when it comes to an impish linguistic playfulness, written in such beautiful comic prose, offering an idealised world for his readers.
Be it his use of witty classical mythology, or those quaint Latin phrases, or that odd contemporary slang – he has them all woven into his pages, so much that, eminent English writer Evelyn Waugh famously observed that,
“Wodehouse produced an average of three uniquely brilliant and entirely original similes on each page.
Of all his amazing novels that form part of his oeuvre, there are quite a few that have fascinated me lots. One among them is titled, Leave It to Psmith (1923) – a novel that holds a distinct place in the Wodehouse-ian universe.
The novel is all about Psmith, an urban, sharp-witted hero, who steps out of his own universe and directly into Blandings Castle - the idyllic realm of Lord Emsworth.
Ronald Psmith endears himself to us more because of the fact that he is a kinda intellectual protagonist, someone who is brilliant, self-aware and at the same time tries to make the entire place around him happy in every way! 😊
He addresses everyone – right from aristocrats to valet impersonators - as “Comrades” with mock-socialist warmth, stunning everyone he meets with elaborate, polite rhetoric, not once losing his cool or calm or composure during the entire course of the novel.
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| 2004 Edition :-) |
And for this exact reason, way back in time - almost 24 years ago, when I had just joined the Dept of English, MCC has Lecturer, I had decided to abridge a few such novels of the legend, at the pace of one novel a month, by retaining his razor-sharp dialogue, in its original aura, but still, making it an easy read for the lay reader, reducing the novel’s size from 350 pages to 25 pages in the process! 😊
Apart from the dialogue, the plot is yet another aspect of the novel that’s got such an unputdownable, joyous pace to it – something that you must feel in order to experience it.
Just giving us all some snippets from the abridged novel – a purely out-and-out self-publication – that I had done using my personal computer and printer, in my own quirky raw and rugged style. 😊
