swiss_family_perelman

THE SWISS FAMILY PERELMAN by S. J. Perelman

1987. Penguin. Paperback.

I'm a sucker for The New Yorker magazine and the coterie of famous
writers who wrote for it in its early years. James Thurber is the
best of these but outdoing him for New York sophistication is
S.J. Perelman, who wrote many humorous pieces for the magazine
and also worked with The Marx Brothers on the movies Animal
Crackers and Horse Feathers.

This book is a travel diary of a round the world trip Perelman
took with his wife and two children in the 1940s. 

Perelman is a New York sophisticate and can't help but write
pretentiously and with florid language. I had to look many
words up in the dictionary and a lot of the 1940s references
had dated. Still, comedy dates quickly and this was still a hugely
entertaining book, 70 years after its 1950 publication.

The most interesting part to me were the descriptions
of Indonesia and the sullen attitude of the locals to
the Dutch colonial masters.  The writing was on the wall.

"The Dutch, apparently impervious to world-wide censure of their
invasion of the Republic of Indonesia, were currently pretending
that their coup de main was successful and that everyone would
be playing patty-cakes shortly. The truth was, nevertheless,
that they controlled only a few isolated areas and those only
by overwhelming weight of arms. You had merely to witness the
sullen contempt with which the Javanese treated their white
protectors to realize that the imperial goose was cooked forever -
a dismaying fact from which Britain in Malaya and France in
Indo-China were still girlishly hiding their eyes."

The paragraph I found the most amusing dealt with the family's
trip to Marseille, where an attempt by Perelman to scare his
kids with a prison visit fails.

"We entrained for Marseilles. My purpose in going there was
dual: to test at first hand its world-famous bouillabaisse
and it's equally renowned ptomaine; and to show the youngsters
the Chateau d'If as an example of what befell people who were
lippy to their fathers. The moral lesson unfortunately went sour
when the guide of the prison accidentally blabbed to the children
that Edmond Dantes had wound up with millions and a title. From
that day forward, my life became a hell."

Some silverfish ate most of the cover of this book and I'm
throwing it away. No loss; this is a read-once, throw away
book anyhow.

                                              4th November 2020

My book reviews are at https://github.com/stucooper/booksiveread