Eli Sashihara writes:

books:


	• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain Library) Mark Twain Cherish Classics, 1985 - 294 pages average customer review:based on 508 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Ole Huck

You'll notice pretty quickly when you pick this up that Huck doesn't spell too good and his grammar isn't so hot either. But if you look a little more closely, you find that he sure knows how to use the semi-colon, and his sentence structure is picture perfect. Mr. Twain may have decided that he was going to have some fun with his charming narrator, but he sure wasn't going to sacrifice good writing to do so.

The novel, as everyone knows, is a masterpiece, and works splendidly on every level. Plot, character development, theme; everything is here. Anybody reading this review has probably read the book several times and moreover has probably read about it a dozen more so it's pretty certain that my little review is not going to add much. I would, however, like to comment on something which struck me while reading it most recently, which is how richly it evokes middle America of the mid-nineteenth century. In other words, as well as being literature of the first rank, Huckleberry Finn also functions as a thorough and fascinating historical document of a time and place that every year sinks deeper and deeper into our collective memory.

Here he is describing Uncle Silas' place in Arkansas upon seeing it for the first time. "It was one of these one-horse cotton plantations and they all look alike. A rail fence round a two-acre yard; a stile made out of logs sawed off and up-ended in steps, like barrels of a different length, to climb over the fence with . . . some sickly grass-patches in the big yard, but mostly it was bare and smooth, like an old hat with the nap rubbed off; big double log house for the white folks--hewed logs with the chinks stopped up with mud or mortar, and these mud stripes been white-washed some time or another; round log-kitchen, with a big, broad open but roofed passage joining it to the house . . . hound asleep there in the sun; more hounds asleep round about . . . outside of the fence a garden and a watermelon patch; then the cottonfields begins, and after the fields the woods."

The first thing that strikes you about this is how . . . impoverished this all is, especially compared to how we live today. And this is a cotton-field owner with a number of slaves! But this was the south: rural, poor, hot, languid. Oh, yes, we are all familiar with the palatial southern mansion from novels like Gone With the Wind; I suspect that most of the South in the 1840s was closer to Huck's description than to Margaret Mitchell's.

Here's Huck's description of the town in which the King and Duke put on their first show: "The stores and houses was most all old, shackly, dried-up frame concerns that hadn't ever been painted; they was set up three or four feet above ground on stilts, so as to be out of reach of the water when the river was overflowed. The houses had little gardens around them, but they didn't seem to raise hardly anything in them but jimpson-weeds, and sunflowers, and ash-piles, and old curled up boots and shoes, and pieces of bottles, and rags, and played-out tinware . . . There was generly hogs in the garden, and people driving them out." Charming, eh? Of course, we in our modern twenty-first century aren't immune to such slovenliness. Sometimes, historical descriptions remind us that things don't change much.

Along with his brilliant observations of humanity and the human habitat the novel also contains breathtaking descriptions of nature, especially the Mississippi River. There's heavy timber on the Missouri side, mountains on the Illinois side, the lights of St. Louis: "We run nights, and laid up and hid daytimes; soon as night was most gone we stopped navigating and tied up--nearly always in the dead water under a towhead . . . Next we slid into the water and had a swim, so as to freshen up and cool off; then we sat down on the sandy bottom where the water was about knee-deep, and watched the daylight come. Not a sound anywhere--perfectly still--just like the whole world was asleep, only sometimes the bullfrogs a cluttering, maybe. The first thing you see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line--and that was the woods on t'other side." How wonderfully evocative this is; how it makes one ache to experience such things!

Again, the novel is so much more than this. I'm not going to bother with the theme and the plot and the characters--what else is there to say?--but I can not finish this without giving an example or two of the wonderful humor contained in here. Here's the charming Huck after sneaking into the circus under the tent: "I ain't opposed to spending money on circuses when there ain't no other way, but there ain't no use in wasting it on them." And when the King and the Duke run on hard times: "First they done a lecture on temperance, but they didn't make enough for them both to get drunk on. Then, in another village, they started a dancing-school; but they didn't know no more than how to dance than a kangaroo does, so the first prance they made the general public pranced in and pranced them out of town . . . "

Oh, how rich this is. Rich and funny and lovely and hilarious. Read it for the pure entertainment contained in here, if nothing else.

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Perfect for Teachers

I have heard about many of the essays included in this text and was excited to find that I could get them all in one book. I love the footnotes for additional information and the fact that the essays include both sides to teaching this book. I highly recommend for anyone who needs to know more about this classic text.

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Eli Sashihara writes:

Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a timeless classic that lives up to its prestigious name. It takes place in an array of locations along the Mississippi river around the time of 1835-45. The story is about Tom, a free-spirited boy, and his numerous adventures with a run-away slave named Jim.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn proceeds Mark Twain's original novel, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but within the first page Huck acknowledges this and says reading the first book isn't that important. However, I personally recommend reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer before this book. While it is not essential, it adds a lot to the book and gives an initial understanding Huck's character.

The book starts right where The Adventures of Tom Sawyer ended: Huck is struggling to fit into his new found "civilized" life with the Widow Douglas. Huck is uncomfortably forced to learn to be proper while his fortune is held for him.

It wasn't long till Huck's Pap, the village drunk, came to kidnap Huck for his fortune. After living with his abusive father for a while, Huck decides to escape. One night, Huck feigns a robbery on his Pap's cabin and then feigns his own death. Huck escapes to a nearby island and decides to live there. Soon word spreads through town about Huck's death and the town suspects Huck's father, but then suspicions transfer to a runaway slave named Jim who was living on the same island.

Jim and Huck set off on a raft before people could find them. They embark on a series of adventures, including boarding the ships of robbers, murder mysteries, gunfights, family feuds, great storms, mobs, con artists, and other extravaganzas. During their voyages they also come to deal with a series of topics and realizations, such as the irony and hypocrisy of "civilized" and adult culture, slavery, racism, morality, human nature, and superstition.

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Required Reading

This was a required reading for my son's class at school. Although he enjoyed the story line, the use of the local slang (written out phonetically ) was difficult for him to read and distracting to the story, he felt.

Huck Finn

This book is required reading for my 16 yr old son....the
book arrived quickly & in great shape! Saved me driving all
over town to compete w/ other parents also looking!! Thanks!

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

'Cordially hated and dreaded by all the mothers of the town because he was idle, and lawless, vulgar, and bad - and because all their children admired him so', Huckleberry Finn, the fourteen-year-old son of the town drunkard, joins runaway slave Jim on an exciting journey down the mighty Mississippi River on a raft.

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