Gargantua et Pantagruel Add a review

The Five Books of the Lives and Deeds of Gargantua and Pantagruel (French: Les Cinq livres des faits et dits de Gargantua et Pantagruel), often shortened to Gargantua and Pantagruel or the Cinq Livres (Five Books), is a pentalogy of novels written in the 16th century by François Rabelais. It tells the adventures of two giants, Gargantua ( gar-GAN-tew-ə; French: [ɡaʁɡɑ̃tɥa]) and his son Pantagruel ( pan-TAG-roo-el, -⁠əl, PAN-tə-GROO-əl; French: [pɑ̃taɡʁyɛl]). The work is written in an amusing, extravagant, and satirical vein, features much erudition, vulgarity, and wordplay, and is regularly compared with the works of William Shakespeare and James Joyce. Rabelais was a polyglot, and the work introduced "a great number of new and difficult words ... into the French language".

The work was stigmatised as obscene by the censors of the Collège de la Sorbonne. In a social climate of increasing religious oppression in the lead up to the French Wars of Religion, contemporaries treated it with suspicion and avoided mentioning it.

"Pantagruelism", a form of stoicism, developed and applied throughout, is (among other things) "a certain gaiety of spirit confected in disdain for fortuitous things" (French: une certaine gaîté d'esprit confite dans le mépris des choses fortuites).