Lewis Carroll: Alicen seikkailut ihmemaassa

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
Lewis Carroll
suom. Alice Martin
WSOY, 1995
sivuja 133


Kirjastosta
GR: 3/5
★★ ½

Again this was one of those children's classics I never read as a child. However I believe I have a graphic novel made from the book, and I recall that I didn't really like it, neither I was crazy about the movie. But this is a classic, a short one, and on three of my "lists", people are also expected to know the story, so... So what did I think about this one, then?

It seems my tastes haven't changed that much because I didn't fell in love with it. There were some smart word plays (maybe I should have read this in English but the translator had done a good job, even if I could guess some of the original text sometimes) but fantasy has never been my thing. I appreciated the fact that there is French in a book for children (and some Latin, too) and that I learned a bit vulgar word while checking it (some things are called by words with a similar meaning, it seems, no matter the language...), also "antipathy" is something you don't often see (I'm guessing there, it was a translation, after all) or for example children being offered wine.

I think my problem was that none of the characters were that interesting or even likable, maybe apart from the Cheshire Cat. Most of them were almost mean and it started to get repetitive. It doesn't usually bother me but it didn't really make the book fun to me, either. I suppose my sense of humour is so dry (or something) that this kind of "nonsense" literature doesn't quite work. If I knew more about the people that the characters were possibly based, or the children's rhymes mentioned, I might have enjoyed it more. I did understand some of the symbolism but I might be so far removed from the original audience that I must have missed a lot. So as a conclucion I guess this might be a book best loved when read as a child, if read as an adult for the first time it might lose some of its charm.