Didn't finish. It's hard to enjoy a satire when you haven't experienced the satirised subject matter. Often you can't even tell whether the author is at the moment being satirical or in earnest. ( )

Having read much Kant and too much Hegel, I discovered Carlyle's very humorous take on the German philosophers with pleasure. Carlyle's prose is always clever and often hilariously overwrought (at one point, he likens his protagonist's philosophy to a hundred fiery Minerva's springing from the forehead of Jupiter!), and his taste in philosophy is sensible (Hegel and Voltaire each merit a lampoon). That said, Carlyle sometimes buries his thoughts under so many layers of irony that I doubt whether he himself had yet decided what he meant to say. This makes much of the third part of Sartor slow reading and probably less rewarding than his later works. ( )

Even now that I've read it I'm not entirely sure what prompted me to pick this up at the library book sale this spring. Probably it was the back-cover text noting that the book was inspired in part by Tristram Shandy, which is one of my favorites. I do know that this one doesn't hold up nearly as well, isn't nearly as funny, and certainly won't be a book I am likely to read again. ( )

I read this book approximately 18 times in college. Each time for a class, and each time less painful than the last. Sartor Resartus grew on me. I hope to never read it again. I keep it out of spite. ( )

I read this novel in a Victorian prose class in graduate school more than ten years ago. Although I enjoyed it then, I felt I was missing something because of time pressures, and I wanted to read it at a more leisurely pace. I also reread the introduction. I had forgotten how influential this book was. Its ancestors include Laurence Sterne and his imaginative novel, Tristram Shandy. Sartor’s descendents include Melville’s Moby Dick, and James Joyce’s Ulysses. The appendices, which I did not read then, proved helpful in understanding Carlyle’s thoughts during and after the writing of the novel.

As the short biography included in my edition tells us, Carlyle was the son of a dour, strict Calvinist, who viewed fiction as some form of deceit. This was a fairly wide-held view in the 19th century, hence the number of novels based on “found manuscripts,” which the author was careful to warn the reader that the author could not attest to the veracity of the facts related. Carlyle abandoned fiction for this dubious line of reasoning after completing Sartor.

This imaginative novel is really an essay about a made up philosopher, Diogenes Teufelsdroeckh, who has written an extensive treatise on clothes. Now, I can imagine this might sound boring to some, but it is full of humor – the extremely dry British variety, and this novel contains much of the philosophy current in the early years of the Victorian Age. Again, as the Introduction says, Sartor is key to understanding that influential period.

In fact, the Introduction also claims that Sartor did for the Victorian age what Lyrical Ballads did for the Augustan Age – turn it on its head before destroying it.

So. Am I glad I reread this novel? Yes. At just over 200 pages it only took a few hours, and I really do think I have a better understanding of Carlyle’s great novel now than I did back then. Four stars.

--Jim, 3/20/08 ( )