Nerd Picnic reviewed Uncle Dynamite by P. G. Wodehouse
Wodehouse almost breaks the fourth wall
4 stars
It's a truism that to point out "all P.G. Wodehouse's plots are the same" is to miss the point by several miles. He was a virtuoso. You probably can't catch all the layers of humor and nimbleness in his prose in a single read-through anyway, so what's the difference if you read the plot more than once?
This particular book about Uncle Fred a.k.a. Uncle Dynamite was published more than seventy-five years ago, and I still laughed out loud.
One noteworthy bit is that Wodehouse, who is the omniscient narrator here (unlike in the Jeeves novels which are in Bertie Wooster's first-person perspective), freely uses the editorial "we" and gets a bit meta. One passage near the end heaps praise on the high moral fortitude of publishing houses. Another aside seems to describe his own sentence as "clever." Who could argue?
A content warning: this story, which was written right …
It's a truism that to point out "all P.G. Wodehouse's plots are the same" is to miss the point by several miles. He was a virtuoso. You probably can't catch all the layers of humor and nimbleness in his prose in a single read-through anyway, so what's the difference if you read the plot more than once?
This particular book about Uncle Fred a.k.a. Uncle Dynamite was published more than seventy-five years ago, and I still laughed out loud.
One noteworthy bit is that Wodehouse, who is the omniscient narrator here (unlike in the Jeeves novels which are in Bertie Wooster's first-person perspective), freely uses the editorial "we" and gets a bit meta. One passage near the end heaps praise on the high moral fortitude of publishing houses. Another aside seems to describe his own sentence as "clever." Who could argue?
A content warning: this story, which was written right after WWII but set in the vague earlier heydey of the British upper class, refers frequently to "the natives" of colonized Africa and the Amazon jungle. The colonizer / "explorer" characters are ridiculed along with everyone else - but it's pretty dated, and something to be aware of.