Customer Reviews

The Antiquary (Oxford World's Classics)

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4 star:		(1)
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Before OUP World's Classics published this handsome, attractive new edition, you could only get this novel in paperback through Penguin. The Penguin edition, sadly, gives the book in a tinkered-with text that Scott never saw, and supplies it with a baffling and unhelpful introduction by some academic called Punter that he wouldn't have understood a word of. This was a crying shame, as The Antiquary is Scott's funniest, most mature book and amply deserves the loving treatment OUP have now given it. The introduction and notes to this new amazingly inexpensive paperback are clear, intelligent & actually intended to help someone enjoy a very subtle and profound piece of storytelling - well done to this N Watson (a good Scots name, promisingly!). The book itself, as I say, is hilarious and surprisingly moving, as good on personal emotion and behaviour as Austen but with the gift for big-scale action and comedy of Dickens or Thackeray -- the bit with the fight with the seal just goes on getting funnier.

This book is rare fun indeed!--Aside from the rather pat basic plot---But what do you expect when you open one of Sir Walter's Romances? ---the Oxford edition, supplied with Scott's own glossary of unco Scottish terms and the ever helpful Oxford notes offers enjoyment and delight at every turn. I say a Romance, and that IS the basic plot structure here, but it's the Comedy that will catch most readers, I trow: Particularly, the comedy in the learned dissertations and piquant observations of the eponymous antiquary, Mr. Oldbuck, but perhaps even more so in the canny phrasings of the itinerant "Bedesman" or "gaberlunzie" Edie Ochiltree.

The most wonderful character though is the Scottish dialect itself. I find myself, after reading this book that Scott loved above all his others, thinking and almost talking in the musical cadences and turns of phrase interlarded throughout the book

Perhaps, as the academics say, this is a book that deals with "the problem of how to understand the past so as to enable the future." - Enable the future? - In any event, don't miss out on these truly lovely narrative annals of times lang syne.

And beware the "phoca"!

Readers;
It is good to see Sir W.Scott back amoung the shelves. The creator of modern Scots culture and literature, is at last seen in America.
This is a good book to start you first reading of this writer of the highest order.
Happy Reading, buy a copy, and then some others

I opened this book with really high expectations, after reading (and really loving) Ivanhoe not too long ago.

The story, which centers on mistaken identity, buried treasure, societal status, and duplicity aplenty, is, as others have said, rather a basic read in terms of plot complexity. Having read numerous 'classics' in the same ilk as this, it's easy to figure out what Lovel's 'big secret' (or rather 'revelation') will turn out to be. The 'comic relief' character of Edie Ochiltree provides many laughs along the way, but in terms of other characters and their development, I really found myself not investing too much care for any one of them, really. The 'hero' and 'heroine', such as they are, of the story really aren't focused on well enough, in my mind, to be all that wrapped up in their outcome.

Nevertheless, I did read this book through to its logical, if not predictable, conclusion. And though I do love 'authenticity' in a novel, I did find the Scottish dialect a bit tedious to follow along with and deciper.

While this will not deter me from reading other Waverly novels by Walter Scott, I must say that this likely will not be one of my favorites.