The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare
by G. K. Chesterton
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Book Summary Information
Author: G. K. ChestertonEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-11-29
ISBN: 1449926029
Number of pages: 152
Publisher: CreateSpace
Book Reviews of The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare
Book Review: Philosophical Essay Wrapped in a Political Thriller
Summary: 4 Stars
You know how tortilla chips are just the vehicle to eat salsa or queso? In much the same way, this book is a vehicle for Chesterton to present his philosophy. When I started the book, I thought it was going to be a political thriller/mystery with philosophy thrown in. Actually, it turns out the book is philosophy with a political thriller/mystery thrown in. I realized this too late so missed a lot of the symbolism. This book addresses worldview, God, politics and more and is considered to be one of the top books of the 20th Century. You may have to read it more than once to understand it. I might even recommend that you read an analysis of the novel beforehand.
Here is an analysis I found helpful:
[...]
Summary of The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare
The 100th Anniversary Edition of Chesterton's masterpiece. "G. K. Chesterton's THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY is a wacky, nightmarish, deliriously well-written adventure story for grownups in which nothing is what it seems and everyone wears a mask, whether figurative or literal. It's hard to think of a more thrilling book." -Kate Christensen, TIME Magazine's Summer Reading List 2009In an article published the day before his death, G.K. Chesterton called The Man Who Was Thursday "a very melodramatic sort of moonshine." Set in a phantasmagoric London where policemen are poets and anarchists camouflage themselves as, well, anarchists, his 1907 novel offers up one highly colored enigma after another. If that weren't enough, the author also throws in an elephant chase and a hot-air-balloon pursuit in which the pursuers suffer from "the persistent refusal of the balloon to follow the roads, and the still more persistent refusal of the cabmen to follow the balloon."
But Chesterton is also concerned with more serious questions of honor and truth (and less serious ones, perhaps, of duels and dualism). Our hero is Gabriel Syme, a policeman who cannot reveal that his fellow poet Lucian Gregory is an anarchist. In Chesterton's agile, antic hands, Syme is the virtual embodiment of paradox:
He came of a family of cranks, in which all the oldest people had all the newest notions. One of his uncles always walked about without a hat, and another had made an unsuccessful attempt to walk about with a hat and nothing else. His father cultivated art and self-realization; his mother went in for simplicity and hygiene. Hence the child, during his tenderer years, was wholly unacquainted with any drink between the extremes of absinthe and cocoa, of both of which he had a healthy dislike.... Being surrounded with every conceivable kind of revolt from infancy, Gabriel had to revolt into something, so he revolted into the only thing left--sanity.Elected undercover into the Central European Council of anarchists, Syme must avoid discovery and save the world from any bombings in the offing. As Thursday (each anarchist takes the name of a weekday--the only quotidian thing about this fantasia) does his best to undo his new colleagues, the masks multiply. The question then becomes: Do they reveal or conceal? And who, not to mention what, can be believed? As The Man Who Was Thursday proceeds, it becomes a hilarious numbers game with a more serious undertone--what happens if most members of the council actually turn out to be on the side of right? Chesterton's tour de force is a thriller that is best read slowly, so as to savor his highly anarchic take on anarchy. --Kerry Fried
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