Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice

A 40 year old poet running simultaneously to fat and seed suddenly finds himself in the body of his 19 self. The immediate advantage is that he can seduce any woman he comes across, without trying, and sometimes even against his will, So Jurgen, the eponymous hero of the novel by James Branch Cabell is both driven and chased on a knight's quest through a variety of mythological worlds including versions of Heaven and Hell, until he becomes disenchanted with his enchanted existence and gratefully seizes to the opportunity to return to his natural body and his shrewish wife.
First published in 1919, Jurgen was a hit of the jazz age, its popularity boosted by a prosecution by the New York Society For The Prevention Of Vice. Its reputation popped with the stock market bubble and when James Branch Cabell died in 1958 both he and his masterpiece were long forgotten.

Man Alive

This is the Centenary year of G. K. Chesterton’s novel Man Alive!, an early satire on Social Science, and a philosophical romance. Chesterton was born in London in 1874 at the very beginning of our modern world. He appeared simultaneously with domestic electricity and mass communication. He was to become the modern world’s first critic. Between 1904 and 1914 he published five fantastic, as opposed to fantasy novels (including The Flying Inn). They begin in our familiar world which is then stretched preposterously with an eerie logic. Chesterton is a novelist of ideas, and, like a classic sci-fi writer, asks what would happen if a concept was followed through to its conclusion. The result is usually both absurd and dangerous, all the more so if the concept was originally rational and well intentioned.

Of the fantastic novels The Man Who Was Thursday has become a classic, while the other four have dropped from sight. Novels of ideas are traditonally gloomy and introspective. Since Psychology was one of the new schools of thought Chesterton refused to believe in, his are exhuberant. Nevertheless in Innocent Smith, the childish madman protagonist of Man Alive there is something of a self-portrait that is more revealing of Chesterton than even his Autobiography. Man Alive at project Gutenberg.