Customer Reviews

The Man with Two Left Feet

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Man with two left feet is a delightful book. People have been raving about Wodehouse for a long time and I have enjoyed watching Jeeves and Wooster but this is my first venture beyond Jeeves.

It is very easy reading BUT cleverly written.

This book is a compilation of fourteen short, amusing and sometime poignant stories. Wodehouse is not deep so it was a great choice for a recent trip for on board reading.

My favorite in this book was actually not The Man with Two Left Feet but rather At Geisenheimer's.

The drawback to this Kindle version is that while you can see the Table of Contents, you are not able to maneuver through the contents so that you really are left to read the short stories in order without skipping
around. Thus the four star instead of five star review for this particular version.

This is a very unusual collection for Wodehouse. The stories in "The Man With Two Left Feet" are very unlike his usual style. Most take place in New York, one is told from the first person perspective of a woman, and one is even told from the point of view of a dog. However, every one has the classic humor and expectadly unexpected happy ending that Wodehouse is known for, and each was a delightful read. As usual, Wodehouse kept me smiling throughout ~ even with only a brief visit from our old friend Bertie.

This collection of short stories is entertaining, an easy read, and charming with its time-period, old-fashioned language and writing style. My favorite story was At Geisenheimer's. It was predictable, but charming, and I read it twice! I was frustrated with the inability to easily move around between stories. (The table of contents was not linked.) The format was poor, with the stories kind of running right after each other without a terribly clear delineation between chapters. Once I got the hang of it, it was okay, but not ideal. Since this was the first book I read on Kindle, I was somewhat confused for some time trying to learn to navigate.

Another collection of Wodehouse stories, only one of which ("Extricating Young Gussie") is a Bertie Wooster story. Reading these stories at the same time as the first volume of Theodore Sturgeon's complete short stories constantly had me drawing comparisons between the two writers. Wodehouse never wrote fantasy *per se* (that is, Bertie Wooster never encountered a genie or a god in his garden), but in truth his stories were always fantastical. As commentators have said, the idyllic world of young men in spats and authoritative aunts was a figment of Wodehouse's imagination, and never existed at any time in England. I don't think Wodehouse would have disagreed; he knew the power of fantasy. In this volume, he tells one story ("The Mixer") from the point of view of a dog, and one of his habits was to read the entire Shakespeare's collected works every year, and Willy wasn't a stranger to fantasy, either.

The Man with Two Left Feet is a delightful collection of 13 short stories by P.G. Wodehouse. Each is clever and witty. Two are written from a dog's point of view, which I appreciated, since my dog Charlie blogs ([...]). I loved that the dog calls himself a "mixer," since my dog likes people, too; and it was so funny how the mixer's sensitivity to the "shyness" of a gentleman carried the story. The little romances were sweet. "At Geisenheimer's" was my favorite. I was hoping for more Bertie Wooster stories, but this volume included only one, "Extricating Young Gussie," whose ironies and silly names I thoroughly enjoyed.

I'll finish with an example of Wodehouse's subtle humor, taken from the anthology's final story, titled "The Man with Two Left Feet." Henry liked to read the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and he took notes as he read. "He read the BIS-CAL volume because, after many days, he had finished the A-AND, AND-AUS, and the AUS-BIS. ... The ordinary man who is paying instalments on the Encyclopaedia Britannica is apt to get over-excited and to skip impatiently to Volume XXVIII (VET-ZYM) to see how it all comes out in the end. Not so Henry."

As with previous comments, I have enjoyed Wooster & Jeeves. These stories are a quick read by a very humorous writer. and the price was right!

There were some very funny stories in this collection and I imagine it could serve as an introduction to Wodehouse because it was my first time reading his work. Recommended!

This collection is slightly better than its similarly titled predecessor, _The Man Upstairs_; the proper reading order for Wodehouse completists would put this one just after that one, since it contains stories written well before the book publication date. It might also make sense to read the Reggie Pepper stories added to the American version, published in the British version of _My Man Jeeves_, originally published 1911 and after.
The stories are mostly more of Wodehouse's early crude ridicule of the lower classes, with some notable exceptions. The very first Bertie Wooster story "Extricating Young Gussie" is worth reading, though Jeeves is barely mentioned. "At Geisenheimer's" is remarkably dark and mature; I think Wodehouse was subtly deconstructing his early coincidence-driven plotting--the plot is not as preposterous as it first appears. The rest are mostly unreadable, with "The Mixer: He Meets a Shy Gentleman" notable only for Wodehouse's third (by my count) instance of getting humor from the killing of a dog.

Man with two left feet is a delightful book. People have been raving about Wodehouse for a long time and I have enjoyed watching Jeeves and Wooster but this is my first venture beyond Jeeves.

It is very easy reading BUT cleverly written.

This book is a compilation of fourteen short, amusing and sometime poignant stories. Wodehouse is not deep so it was a great choice for a recent trip for on board reading.

My favorite in this book was actually not The Man with Two Left Feet but rather At Geisenheimer's.

Another collection of Wodehouse stories, only one of which ("Extricating Young Gussie") is a Bertie Wooster story. Reading these stories at the same time as the first volume of the Collected Theodore Sturgeon constantly had me drawing comparisons between the two writers. Wodehouse never wrote fantasy *per se* (that is, Bertie Wooster never encountered a genie or a god in his garden), but in truth his stories were always fantastical. As commentators have said, the idyllic world of young men in spats and authoritative aunts was a figment of Wodehouse's imagination, and never existed at any time in England. I don't think Wodehouse would have disagreed; he knew the power of fantasy. In this volume, he tells one story ("The Mixer") from the point of view of a dog, and one of his habits was to read the entire Shakespeare's collected works every year, and Willy wasn't a stranger to fantasy, either.

(This "review" originally appeared in First Impressions Installment Twenty-One [http://www.owt.com/users/gcox/fi.contents.html].)