G.K. Chesterton, Manalive
I'm a big fan of G.K. Chesterton's writing. Regarding Chesterton's fiction, I used to think Napoleon of Notting Hill was my favorite, but then I read The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare. Now that I've just finished reading Chesterton's 1912 novel, Manalive, I think I have a new Chesterton fiction favorite.Manalive is a clever piece of literature that celebrates the joy of being alive. I couldn't put the book down. Chesterton reminds me of the simple fact that having two legs gives me reason to be filled with wonder and gratitude. Here's a helpful synopsis of the book from the back cover of the Dover edition:
"...Manalive celebrates one of G.K. Chesterton's earliest themes: the joy of being alive. That principle is embodied in one Innocent Smith, who is taken up by a fierce wind one day and dropped on the lawn of a boarding house inhabited by a group of disillusioned young people. His arrival has a rejuvenating effect on this dull group."In the course of the book, Smith courts and remarries his wife repeatedly, lives in various houses, which all turn out to be his own, and attempts murder, but only succeeds in firing life into his victims."Perhaps the most lighthearted of all Chesterton's 'serious' books, Manalive is full of high-spirited nonsense expressing important ideas: life is worth living, one can break with convention and still maintain moral and ethical standards, and much of the behavior that civilized man has been led to believe is wrong, isn't wrong at all."
Intrigued? I hope so. To further intrigue you, here's a few quotes from the book, which won't have their full effect since the entire context is missing, but are nevertheless quite good and worth your time:
"He was simply forgetting himself, like a little boy at a party. He had somehow made a giant stride from babyhood to manhood, and missed that crisis in youth when most of us grow old.""It is the fashion to talk of institutions as cold and cramping things. The truth is that when people are in exceptionally high spirits, really wild with freedom and invention, they always must, and they always do, create institutions. When men are weary they fall into anarchy; but while they are gay and vigorous they invariably make rules. This, which is true of all the churches and republics of history, is also true of the most trivial parlor game or the most unsophisticated meadow romp. We are never free until some institution frees us; and liberty cannot exist until it is declared by authority.""His principle can be quite simply stated: he refuses to die while he is still alive. He seeks to remind himself by every electric shock to the intellect that he is still a man alive, walking on two legs about the world. For this reason he fires bullets at his best friends; for this reason he arranges ladders and collapsible chimneys to steal his own property; for this reason he goes plodding around the whole planet to get back to his own home. And for this reason he has been in the habit of taking the woman whom he loved with a permanent loyalty, leaving her about (so to speak) at schools, boarding-houses, and places of business, so that he might rediscover her again and again with a raid and a romantic elopement. He seriously sought by a perpetual recapture of his bride to keep alive the sense of her perpetual value, and the perils that should be run for her sake.""There must be something to wake up to! All we do is preparations--your cleanliness, and my healthiness, and Warner's scientific appliances. We're always preparing for something--something that never comes off. I ventilate the house, and you sweep the house, but what is going to happen in the house?"