Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
I read this in the evenings trying to keep up with two of my children reading it. Never had before. Should have read it before they did, and kept it from them.
Never has a "classic" evoked such antipathy in me!
Alice has a dream, and Lewis Carroll wallows in the absurd and the verbal pun the whole time. I enjoy fantastical and imaginative characters and plots, but the puns were groaners and the plot was deliberately absurd. Like the cubism of modern art, as my wife noted.
The random, disorderliness disturbed me to the degree that I sought out an explanation. Apparently Lewis Carroll was a mathematics professor at Oxford who enjoyed playing with logic and number puzzles. Many are buried in the dialogue of Alice, but the one I studied wasn't worth the effort. So the snippets of meaning are inaccessible to 99% of readers.
I cling to the thesis that I'm not an old crank who dislikes children's stories; I just demand some level of order to my stories, because that's how God wrote His. Plenty of chaos is fine, but here we seem to have a proto-type of post-modernism, eschewing meaning and metanarrative altogether.
I will not be reading any more Lewis Carroll.
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