Reviews for The Inimitable Jeeves

The average rating for The Inimitable Jeeves based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-03-07 00:00:00 Gerald Balistreri "Oh dear, Bertie Wooster, it seems as if your servant is satirizing our style of living with the help of subtle irony and puns." Faints It�s an interesting sociocultural, epigenetic study to look at how Wodehouse had to adapt his satire to a level that was still funny and a tiny little bit controversial enough to attract progressive readers, but also balanced on the razorblade sharp line of potentially falling too much towards social criticism and black sarcasm. The evolution of language is a hilarious sociolinguistic topic, nothing better than to watch the ingroups and alphas talk in ways everyone else in the same era, and the trends before and after, deem complete self satire without recognizing. Cough. Hipsters.Cough. And close so nothing beats Middle Ages knight and king talking style, the awful German language with all its excesses and strange native speakers tending to construct completely unreadable, tapeworm long sentences, and the always welcome snobby English colonial time era talking. Just imagine how it might develop in hundreds and thousands of years with different cultures on Earth and in space, they might be close to completely unintelligible for nowadays modern speakers. Wodehouse uses this mixture of attitude, elitism, and the underlying naivety, stupidity, ignorance, and evil behind talking like a sir, to dismantle the superficiality, bigotry, and hypocrisy of his time, owning the elite he was a part of, doing what the greatest comedians and satirists before and after him new is most important. Show the ugly beast of a degenerated society its reflection in the mirror of ridiculousness, going full frontal meta postmodernism, as already Cervantes�Don Quixote, Swifts�Gullivers�travels, ancients tales from Greece, Rome, Middle East, Asia, etc. I�ve just heard about or already forgotten, etc. did and let the creature called human social conditioning and cultural brainwashing realize what an incestuous monster it is. The beginnings of the comedy genre have a serious, underlying topic, that tends to be forgotten in each era, too. We laugh about the strange and senseless behavior of the old generations, but completely ignore the dissonances and madnesses of our modern age, deeming the behavior of society, the whole system, but especially ourselves completely logical. Just imagine how future centuries comedians will make extremely disturbing dark comedy fun about how we blindly and complacently danced next to the volcano melting extreme social injustice with climate change and environmental destruction and how intelligent each other generation before us will seem in contrast. Because they, at least, just killed each other, but didn�t destroy everything, within not even 2 centuries from 1900 to 2100, that once made Earth a garden Eden, ironically inspired by the same sick, stupid ideologies that were born out of similar autocratic writings as the term itself. Tropes show how literature is conceptualized and created and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique:

Review # 2 was written on 2017-06-17 00:00:00 Randall Merager The Inimitable Jeeves (1923) is the first full-length book completely devoted to Jeeves and Wooster (My Man Jeeves, only half Jeeves, featured the proto-Wooster Reggie Pepper), and my sense is that neither the gentleman�s gentleman, nor his gentleman, has reached perfection here. Jeeves is less Olympian, perhaps a tad too familiar with Bertie, Bingo and their betting friends, and Wooster�s narrative voice lacks that miraculous unity of brainless superficiality and incisive social observation which characterizes Woosterian narration at its finest. In addition, the book has the disadvantage of pretending to be a novel, even though it is obviously a collection of short stories, with most of the seven stories separated into two distinct chapters. Some of the stories are too similar in plot, and the overall narrative does not increase in hilarity, as the Jeeve�s novels customarily do. All this is completely excusable in a story collection, but The Inimitable claims to be a novel. Still it is Jeeves and Wooster, and it is funny. Jeeves disapproves of Bertie�s more colorful accessories, cousins Claude and Eustace wreak social havoc, Bingo Little falls continually (oh so inappropriately) in love, Bertie tries to help but mucks up everything, and �Aunt is calling to Aunt like mastadons bellowing across primeval swamps.� The elements of classic Jeeves and Wooster are all here. And this book is a good beginning.