And this was My Man Jeeves by P G Wodehouse. I know lots of people who find Wodehouse hysterically funny. I never have. However this was on the poster so I got a chance to see if, in the decades since I last read anything of his, my taste in that direction had changed. It had not.
This is a book of short stories and I think is the one in which Jeeves and Wooster were first introduced. There are also a couple of stories about another Wooster type, although one who likes golf, called Reggie something. Possibly Pepper.
I still don't find these clever, except in a very mechanistic, Whitehall farce kind of a way. I still don't find them funny ether. What I do find is that, under a false cloak of 'how-dim-are-men?' they are deeply deeply misogynistic, and that leaves a very unpleasant taste.
I might have left this as neither a hit nor a miss, on the grounds that of its type its quite good, its just not my type of thing. But the misogyny I'm afraid takes it a very very long way into Miss territory.
True of a lot of “classics”. It’s depressing to reread things I used to enjoy, and to realise how misogynistic they are - and then to realise that I took the misogyny as normal life xx
ReplyDeleteI remember reading them when I was about 10. I have never felt inclined to revisit. I suspect the 10 year old me did not see the same things I would now . . .
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