Giovanni Boccaccio

The Decameron (Penguin Classics)

The Decameron (c.1351) was written in the wake of the Black Death, a shattering epidemic which had shaken Florence's confident entrepreneurial society to its core. n a country villa outside the city, ten young noble men and women who have escaped the plague decide to tell each other stories. Boccaccio's skill as a dramatist is masterfully displayed in this virtuoso performance of one hundred tales, vivid portraits of people from all stations in life, with plots which revel in a bewildering variety of human reactions. Themes are playfully restated from one story to another within an elegant and refined framework. One of Chaucer's most fruitful sources for the Canterbury Tales, Boccaccio's work artfully combines the essential ingredients of narrative: fate and desire, crises and quick-thinking. This new translation by Guido Waldman captures the exuberance and variety and tone of Boccaccio's masterpiece.

The Decameron

Cameron

 No physician's prescriptions, no medicine seemed of the slightest benefit as a cure for this disease. In addition to those trained in medicine, the number of men and women who claimed to be physicians without having studied the subject at all grew immensely; however, whether it was that the nature of the malady would not permit it, or because doctors were unable to discover its origins and therefore could not apply the proper remedy, not only did few people recover but indeed nearly all the sick would succumb within three days of the above-mentioned symptoms' first appearance; some died sooner, some later, and the majority with no fever, nothing. 

The Decameron (Signet Classics)

Trever

Okay, I understand why this is important and I even admire Boccaccio's ideas for writing this, but these stories get quite tiresome after a while. The 2 stars is just a review of the stories as a whole; some of the individual stores were quite good, like the one where Calandrino thinks he's pregnant. (The humorous stories tend to be more interesting here.) It's just that there's so many that one is more likely than not to not enjoy all of them, and I happened to find that it got tedious to read after awhile.

Maytal

These stories were fun, but had to take them with many grains of salt...like a whole salt container.

Daryl Houston

This was a delight. I learned a little bit about medieval Italy and the plague (apparently the worst in European history) that wrecked the population and I had lots of laughs. The story here is that seven women and three men left disease-ravaged Florence to distract themselves in the nearby countryside by singing, dancing, and telling stories. Each in the company tells a story each day for ten days. More often than not, the stories stick to a common theme for the day, and more often than not, they're at least a little bawdy. 

Boccaccio's book (and his sources) served as source material for some of the stories most of us read from Chaucer, and his book makes me want to go back and reread The Canterbury Tales. It's a pretty long read (in this edition, about 800 pages plus about 140 pages of introductory matter and a bunch of end notes), and though I enjoyed it and didn't ever quite get bogged down, I imagine that many would find it tedious in spite of the belly laughs it so often inspires. It's definitely one I'll dip into from time to time in the future (I dog-eared the best of the dirty jokes).

The Decameron (Penguin Classics)

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