Be Specific About Books As The Night Life of the Gods
| Original Title: | The Night Life of the Gods |
| ISBN: | 0375753060 (ISBN13: 9780375753060) |
| Edition Language: | English |
Thorne Smith
Paperback | Pages: 320 pages Rating: 3.85 | 463 Users | 71 Reviews
Point Containing Books The Night Life of the Gods
| Title | : | The Night Life of the Gods |
| Author | : | Thorne Smith |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | Special Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 320 pages |
| Published | : | December 28th 1999 by Modern Library (first published 1931) |
| Categories | : | Fantasy. Fiction. Humor. Mythology. Classics |
Interpretation Toward Books The Night Life of the Gods
Thorne Smith's rapid-fire dialogue, brilliant sense of the absurd, and literary aplomb put him in the same category as the beloved P. G. Wodehouse. The Night Life of the Gods, the madcap story of a scientist who instigates a nocturnal spree with the Greek gods, is arguably his most sparkling comedic achievement. Hunter Hawk has a knack for annoying his ultra respectable relatives. He likes to experiment and he particularly likes to experiment with explosives. His garage-cum-laboratory is a veritable minefield, replete with evil-smelling clouds of vapor through which various bits of wreckage and mysteriously bubbling test tubes are occasionally visible. With the help of Megaera, a fetching nine-hundred-year-old lady leprechaun he meets one night in the woods, he masters the art (if not the timing) of transforming statues into people. And when he practices his new witchery in the stately halls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, setting Bacchus, Mercury, Neptune, Diana, Hebe, Apollo, and Perseus loose on the unsuspecting citizenry of Prohibition-era New York, the stage is set for Thorne Smith at his most devilish and delightful.Rating Containing Books The Night Life of the Gods
Ratings: 3.85 From 463 Users | 71 ReviewsAssess Containing Books The Night Life of the Gods
It's possible you just need to be at the right point in your life for this book, and I'm too far past that.It was zany and madcap, but for a book that was intended to be humorous, it got perhaps two chuckles from me, and that's about it. I found the characters largely mean-spirited and not the kind of people I'd want anything to do with, so their frathouse shenanigans really weren't all that entertaining.What a fun little book. I think our culture has moved beyond the point where anything can be ribald any more. Things are either explicit or they aren't. And that's a bit of a shame, because there's some fun to be had with subtlety. You feel like you're getting away with something. At any rate, The Night Life Of The Gods was written in 1931, and it is ribald as all hell. It centers around a guy who can turn people to stone and stone statues to people. From this rather ridiculous premise comes a
I read this because Thorne Smith has been compared to one of my favorite writers, P.G. Wodehouse. When I began reading The Night Life of the Gods I didn't know anything about the writer, but my dad remembered having read Topper. He didn't remember if he had liked it or not though because nearly half a century had passed. I'll say this for The Night Life of the Gods: it begins well enough with a comic "mad scientist" scene. The scientist succeeds in what he had been working on, and has to
To be clear, this is not the edition of Nightlife of the Gods that I read - the Ballantine edition that I haul out every few years a reread hasn't been in print for over 20 years.Thorne Smith wrote a number of classic fantasies including Topper (made into a couple of movies and TV series) and I Married a Witch (one of the inspirations for the TV series Bewitched).Nightlife of the Gods is the story of an eccentric, wealthy inventor who invents a ray that turns organics into stone (and back and
This book took me forever to get through, but I think that's more my fault that its. It was pretty funny (in the Wodehouse vein, but slightly less wit and quite a bit more...deviancy?) with some LOL moments, which I always appreciate.
This book suffers from a bad case of being nowhere near as funny as it thinks it is. The story is okay, but most of the characters are not terribly likable (and many can barely can be told apart) and the wit falls flat because it's fairly juvenille and sort of elitist at the same time (you definitely get the impression that no one is cool enough to hang out with these people- cool being defined as heavy drinking and irresponsible, naturally). Additionally, despite little moments and gems of
Thorne satirises nearly everything in this generally enjoyable bit of fluff. Sometimes he is very funny but just as often can become laboured and tiresome. The novel is episodic and I feel that it would have gained by pruning. The book is a pleasant period piece but not a classic.
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