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¡Abajo El Colejio! (1954)

by Geoffrey Willans(Favorite Author)

4.11 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

8415578350 (ISBN13: 9788415578352)

languge

English

genre

Humor

publisher

Impedimenta

series

Molesworth

review 1: Another foray into the category that is "Books I read as a child". I read this as part of "The Compleet Molesworth" which collects all four Molesworth books into one. I wonder what a child of today would make of Molesworth? Even when I was growing up, in the 1970s, this 1950s depiction of boarding schools felt dated. An arcane world of Latin, Trig, Chizz, etc. That said, there was, and is, something wonderful about N. Molesworth's comic musings. The splendid illustrations by Ronald Searle, the incessant misspellings, the ongoing fight against the teachers, and (my personal favourite) fotherington-tomas (""Hullo clouds hullo sky hullo sun"). All of it evokes a lost world of canings, school caps, the remnants of a classical education, masters, bulies, gurls, cads, sop... mores, oiks, parents, and even the skool dog. The book concludes with Molesworth's masterly short story about the Prunes uprising. As a bit of light relief, and a trip down memory lane, I really enjoyed it. Genuinely funny, although perhaps you had to have enjoyed it as a child?
review 2: There's a particular strain of British comic prose that reached its zenith in the late 1940s, early 1950s; no less surreal than the later Spike Milligan and Monty Python, it was satire that came out of harsher economic times, so the background is always a bit shabby, worn out, held together by string. Maurice Richardson, J.B. Morton and W.E Bowman were three of its finest exponents...Geoffrey Willans was another master. This is the first 'Molesworth' book ('Molesworth' ought really to be written in lowercase letters) and it's a gem. Brilliantly illustrated by Ronald Searle, to the point where it is right to speak of Searle as an equal collaborator, it satirises the kind of school life that has long been dead in Britain and yet the inherent anarchy and subversiveness is still as valid as ever... less

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