The Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc is my least favorite of the works I’ve read of Mark Twain thus far (and I’ve read more than a few!). My reasons are as follows:
-
It lacked the characteristic humor (or at least
dark satire) that makes a Mark Twain book a Mark Twain book.
-
Although it recorded a lot of events from Joan
of Arc’s life, I felt Twain didn’t really add anything of his own to the
story. It was more like reading a
biography or history book than a historical fiction novel.
-
The narrator, Louis, was a Phantom Narrator
In fact, most of the characters in this novel are
phantoms. I never got attached or
related to any of them. Even the title
heroine Joan of Arc was a phantom: Louis goes on and on about how perfect she
is, and yet her perfection cost her any depth of personality or psychological
complexity.
Louis is not completely passive, I’ll give him that. He and his friends follow Joan into battle of
their own free will with a loyalty and friendship that stems from…well,
apparently just because Joan is awesome. Sadly Louis’ motivations are never given more foundation than Joan being
the charismatic leader of a noble cause.
One gets the feeling throughout the novel that Twain was
so entranced by the life of Joan of Arc and the person that she was, that he
couldn’t bear to humanize the girl saint or commit the sacrilege of peppering
his plot with bits of dark humor. As a
result, the book is flat.
I would recommend this book to read, not for enjoyment of literature, but actually for a history class. It would make a good essay or research paper, comparing Twain’s interpretation with the historical facts.
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