Reviews for Three-Penny Novel

The average rating for Three-Penny Novel based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-06-25 00:00:00 Gina Vild Und der Haifisch, der hat Z�hne... Well, I think there are only a few authors who deserve the rare combination of the adjective "hilarious" with the serious topic "social criticism". One of them is Kurt Vonnegut, and the other - Bertolt Brecht! Brecht is more commonly known for his plays than for this masterpiece of a novel, and I have postponed rereading it for years, thinking I knew my Brecht and wouldn't need a refresher. However, just like most really good books, this one grows with the experience of the reader, and I found myself laughing out loud several times reading about the financial crimes and sexual misbehaviours that are so well documented in our own times that it seems almost impossible to think Brecht didn't know anything about Trump and Brexit and the impact of social media on the human species. Where there is money up for grabs, there won't be any decency - that is his theory, and it is a quite convincing one. But there will be big words to counterbalance the lack of honourable action. Brecht has all the best words, and he uses them freely to follow the development of Polly Peachum, Macheath, and the rest. Begging is business, just like politics. O tempora o mores!

Review # 2 was written on 2019-02-19 00:00:00 Mike Megantic A three star rating for a novel I abandoned � that needs a word or two of explanation. At first I thought this was going to be a great sardonic, sarcastic, mordant, funny evisceration of the dog-eat-dog life of Victorian capitalism told through three intertwining tales of skullduggery that reveal how this whole thing is a racket from the tippy toppest of Her Majesty�s government down to the groveling no-legged beggar on the streets of Shoreditch. And it is. But it goes completely wrong. And the humour drains away into a small puddle that a one-eyed three-legged cat drinks from. So first we get a one legged soldier returning from the wars who fails in the retail trade and becomes a beggar, only to find that London beggars are mostly controlled by a certain Mr Peachum. He runs an establishment that provides all a beggar could need � false-bottomed trolleys for men with two legs to be able to pose as no-legged, and thin dogs for the blind beggars. Thin? Thin. Their feeding was not at all simple; they had to look as miserable as possible and therefore had to be maintained on the verge of starvation. A blind man with a fat dog has very little prospect of exciting real pity. The public naturally reasons quite instinctively. Scarcely anyone looks at a thin dog; but if by chance the animal is well-fed, some sort of inner voice warns the giver that he might just as well throw his money down the drain. It is a fact that these people unconsciously seek a reason to withhold their money. A good dog must scarcely be able to stand up for weakness. Now that�s a brilliant passage, and probably applies today. All of Britain�s major cities including my own have many beggars huddling in empty shop doorways all with their dogs. These modern beggars are not blind, of course, they are homeless. But their dogs are not thin! They are very well-kept! Our contemporary beggars need to read their Brecht! Also, our author has some great sly descriptions of his characters. Here�s Polly Peachum : She looked very pretty in her flimsy dress and was completely at her ease. As a matter of fact she was no doll but a large, well-formed girl. She was a full helping and no half portion. So with good stuff like that in this novel, what could possibly go wrong? After describing Peachum�s beggar business, Brecht turns to something called the B Shops � a late Victorian version of the Pound Shops we have here in the UK. These are run by our old friend MacHeath � Mack the Knife. You will remember him as a suave lethal gangster When that shark bites with his teeth, babe Scarlet billows start to spread Fancy gloves wears old MacHeath, babe So there's never, never a trace of red But in this novel he�s a middle aged paunchy businessman. So there�s a whole lot of complicated stuff about how he gets the cheap knock-off to sell in his B shops, and that gets really dull. Then, in comes the major complication. This is a scheme by a third guy called Coax to defraud the government by selling them three clapped out ships for the ongoing Boer War. Once Coax has coaxed seven greedy businessmen including Peachum into his defrauding scheme it turns out to be a honeytrap � it turns out that the real con is when he blackmails his business partners. Brecht gets completely lost in the details of all these ever more intertwined and complex business imbroglios and leaves the reader behind. The sharp observations and wicked humour die away. It becomes ever more abstract, ever more turgid. It becomes boring. It becomes very clear why Bertholt Brecht didn�t write another novel. He didn�t know how to.