Today, I suppose, Thackeray's reputation rests above all on his novel Vanity Fair. Still, if his earlier The Luck of Barry Lyndon is less well-known, it comes right after it in renown.
Reading the two one finds Lyndon quite the contrast with Vanity Fair--that earlier book a picaresque recalling an earlier, less genteel, era of literature in its account of Lyndon's adventures as soldier and gambler and fortune-hunter. Indeed, with about half the book set in early modern Germany amidst a major war, and an exceedingly vain, clueless and unreliable first-person narrator describing the proceedings to us, it had me thinking far less of that writer to whom Thackeray is so often compared, Balzac, than Grimmelshausen.
Personally speaking, Lyndon suited me better than Vanity--the tale livelier and brisker, while it was more fun to laugh at Lyndon's blatantly stupid narrator than laugh with Vanity Fair's rather self-satisfied one.
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