In the UK, humour, comedy, has its own literary award. It is sponsored by a sparkling wine and is named after a hilarious classic: P. G. Wodehouse. Actually, the prize is not only named after the creator of the ridiculous Bertie Wooster and his faithful and very smart butler, Jeeves, but it has a most twisted and, of course, comical name. Is named Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize. But the name is not what matters. What matters is that it failed for the first time in the year 2000, a year before she died, absurdly and suddenly, Douglas Adams, the famous author of ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’, at a gym in Montecito, California. And that in his fourth edition he was won by his most diligent and curious disciple: Jasper Fford.
Jasper Fforde (London, 1961) is the author of a small collection of hilarious novels headed by those starring the literary detective Thursday Next. Thursday Next is a thirtysomething capable of sneaking into books since she was a child, capable of intervening in mythical scenes, and of changing them forever. She lives in an England where literature is practically a religion. There are street gangs defending the surrealists, it is believed that William Shakespeare did not write any of his plays – and this is discussed politically – and there are weekly performances of Richard III in which the public participates as they participate in the screenings. ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’. Time travel exists, and anyone can have a dodo as a pet.
pervasive humor
Yes, andIn Fforde’s world, as in Adams’s, anything is possible., and humor is everywhere. “Of course I’ve read Douglas Adams! He was great. The radio drama of ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy‘ – yes, the story was first a radio story by chapters – it premiered just when I finished high school. It was so imaginative! I loved the details. The things that made his world work. Things like the fish of Babel. I have tried to follow in his footsteps in that sense, creating all kinds of things non-stop! “, Fforde himself said on one occasion, shortly after publishing the first adventure of Thursday Next, translated here as ‘The Jane Eyre Affair’ (B editions). It was not with that that he won the famous Wodehouse, but with the third, ‘The Well of Lost Wefts‘.
But back to the fish of Babel and to follow in the footsteps of Adams. The fish of Babel was the charmingly slimy yellowish fish that the protagonists of ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ used as a translator for any language in the galaxy, and that included the boring language of the boring Vogons. Fforde invented something similar for his universe. The translator carbon paper, also known as Rosettapapel. A paper that does not matter in the language in which it is written, always appears in the language that the reader understands. “It’s the Babel fish of the written word,” Fforde said of it. Fforde has also followed in Adams’ footsteps in terms of sales. His novels are real best sellers out there.
Related news
They are so much that the streets of swindonthe real city in which the Thursday Next stories are set, they have started calling themselves after their characters. And yet it remains, as Adams was, a rare bird, an unclassifiable phenomenon within a tradition of unique specimens, capable of launching satires into the world in which Thor destroys airports with a mere punch, angry at the counter of his airline (like Adams), or in which a family of anthropomorphic rabbits becomes, in a short time, millions of unwelcome rabbits in a post-Brexit United Kingdom that nothing but the old familiar supports (in the case of Fforde, and his latest novel, ‘The Constant Rabbit’). Far from reality from the center (most absurd) of it.
Galactic Library
The opening of a Galactic Library for Adams in Anagrama, with new covers for each title that imitate the original (and fabulous) of the late 70s and 80s, comes just in time to celebrate Towel Day – the towel is essential to travel the galaxy in Adams’s novels and, every May 25, readers from all over the world take to the streets with one in memory of the Cambridge genius–, and returns the hope that the collection will be published at some point of unpublished books that was published 20 years ago –just in 2002– in a single volume, and which, in addition to autobiographical writings, includes a large part of an unpublished novel that was going to be called, The Salmon of Doubt, (‘The salmon of doubt ‘). Because what would the Galactic Library be without it?