Having almost run out of books at home, I am now going back
to the 18th century. And it’s
actually better than I expected. Gulliver’s
Travels surprised me by not just being about Lilliput (but then again, that’s
solely due to my ignorance), by being written in a remarkably understandable
English, and crucially by not being boring.
Not all travels are as interesting – the third one in particular
gets to be fairly dull after a while, at least for me – and some of Swift’s
comments just make you cringe (the depiction of women being one, but also the
continuous praise of Britain and its empire).
But the irony and criticism are still fairly current,
although one thing that I found really curious is that for all the things that
Swift imagined, he never seemed to envisage a different political system other
than a monarchy (at least for humans).
Gulliver’s Travels was
a surprisingly pleasant read, but that’s probably also because at the end of it
all he comes back to “his” (and also “my”) Rotherhithe.
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