I’m reading Mark Twain’s Roughing It (link), a disjointed account of his time spent getting to, and living in, the Territory of Nevada. At least, I guess that’s what it’s about. I’m only about a third of the way through the thing and it’s hard to know.
Though it was written as a sort of travel and adventure journal, it reads today as a history. He leaves “the states†to head out to the territories. Utah is run by Brigham Young. The Indian threat is everywhere.
[Twain has some nasty things to say about Indians. On the one hand, he preaches charity, but in the other, his words practically drip with venom. While he does use harsh language about other people, too, he never uses quite so broad a brush as he does when painting the Indians.]
It reads as etymology as well, of course, as does any author writing from another time. For a word guy, that’s a lot of fun.
But what surprises me the most is the fact that it’s not really very good as a general read. That is, when I’m not enjoying it as history, and when Twain isn’t being hilarious (which he can be at the drop of a hat), I suddenly find myself bored. And disappointed.
I’m pretty sure that Roughing It was written for serial publication (that is, a bit at a time, in a magazine or something), which may start to explain why each chapter is practically unrelated to the ones before and after it. But it’s also written in such a rambling style that it’s hard to figure out what the man is trying to say. He’ll go for a while, being funny, then say something like, “But seriously,†and then kill his own joke.
Maybe he was trying to give a true account of things, while also keeping his humorist fans happy. In any case, I’m not sure how much more I can take. I should just decide that it’s all about the historical American west and stop trying to read it as anything else. We’ll see how it goes.
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