Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

Book Review: Chaucer: 1340-1400 - The Life and Times of the First English Poet by Richard West
Okay, I've given it a good try, but I give up on this book. I'm about 50 pages or so to the end, but I've had enough punishment.

Unfortunately, my first impression of the book turned out to be correct: it was too academically-inclined. This turned out to be more so than I thought -- what finally did the book in for me was coming on another section where he decides to refute another scholar's arguments. Though this is too simplistic, the book comes across almost as a string of English essays on Chaucer -- first looking at this theory by somebody else, then strengthening it or trying to demolish it -- all of it haphazardly strung together.

I was hoping for both a personal and a historical analysis of Chaucer in his times. Instead I get academic who methodically plods through various themes in Chaucer's writing, looking at how other critics have perceived him, and then taking sides. Even the history is couched more of historical analysis of the times, ultimately distancing the subject (Chaucer) from the reader. Chaucer comes across at times not so much as a person but as a "critical object".

There are some genuine insights in the book though: the likelihood that Chaucer was an anti-Semite (you can feel the author reluctantly coming to this decision), an informative look at how Chaucer differs from his sources (Boccaccio, Dante, etc), and a plausible reason for why Chaucer was the first English poet: writing in the vernacular tongue was legitimized by contemporary Italian poets. In a chapter devoted to the Black Death, he posits the dubious hypothesis that the reason why it doesn't appear in Chaucer's writings is because mass deaths by disease are quickly forgotten within a society. Right. As somebody who lost an Uncle to the influenza plague following WWI, and knowing its effects on our family, I find this theory hard to take seriously; perhaps since Chaucer was very young when all of this happened and the fact that his writing tends to the light and comic would perhaps be a better explanation as to why the Black Death doesn't factor into his stories much.

Anyways, it was for reasons like that that made me give up on this book.