Novel
The Man Who Was Thursday
G. K. Chesterton · 1908
Opening lines
The suburb of Saffron Park lay on the sunset side of London, as red and ragged as a cloud of sunset.
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
In Saffron Park, a suburb in the west of London, two poets quarrel one evening about anarchy and law: Gregory holds that the poet is only at home in disorder, Syme that nothing is more poetic than the Underground. Stung, Gregory takes him to a tavern in Chiswick and, from there, to an underground room: he truly belongs to an anarchist section, which is to elect that night the Thursday of the supreme council, whose seven members bear the names of the days. Syme then confides a secret to him, takes the floor, and it is he who is elected.
Context
The book's subtitle is “A Nightmare”. In his autobiography, published in 1936, its author remarked that almost no one had looked at this subtitle, and conceded in part to those who saw in the president of the council an image of the Creator that it was rather nature as seen by a pantheist. In an article published the day before his death, he wrote that he had wanted to describe the world of doubt and despair that the pessimists were then painting, with a glimmer of hope in the doubt itself. The book is dedicated in verse to Edmund Clerihew Bentley, his schoolfellow, and was written fourteen years before its author's conversion.
Who it is for
A short novel, built like a detective story that turns into a philosophical tale; translated into French as early as 1911 and retranslated in 2020.
Prizes and reception
Kingsley Amis considered it the most thrilling book he had ever read; Alfonso Reyes translated it into Spanish as early as 1922.
Sources for this page 8
The pages consulted to check this page.