Gargantua

One year, my family gave me the entire Penguin Classics library and some of it is rough sledding, like “Gargantua and Pantagruel.”

All these initial chapters of “Monkey King” exhibit a rollicking exuberance, somewhat like Rabelais’s hyperbolic accounts of the giants Gargantua and Pantagruel.

One of his most famous lithographs, depicting the “citizen king” Louis-Philippe as the grotesquely rapacious Gargantua, was so inflammatory that it landed the artist in prison for six months.

It certainly came well after Renaissance writer François Rabelais – who revelled in Lyon’s culinary traditions, depicting the tawdry delights of offal and cheap cuts in Gargantua and Pantagruel.

At one point, Gargantua rinses his hands in wine, picks his teeth with a pig’s trotter, spreads a green cloth over the table and embarks on an epic spree of card games.