Extract

Drink, for you know not whence you came nor why: Drink, for you know not why you go, nor where.

Giants drink rivers dry, armies are drowned in urine, and an abbey is founded on the single rule of do what you will, all in a torrent of language so exuberant it seems to invent French prose as it goes. François Rabelais published these five books across three decades of the sixteenth century, building from popular giant-tales an edifice containing satire, philosophy, obscenity, humanist learning, and a joy in the body that no subsequent literature has surpassed. Rabelais was a monk, a physician, a scholar of Greek, and he poured all of it into prose that catalogues, parodies, celebrates, and devours everything in its path. This is the great feast of Western literature, and the table groans with more than any single reading can consume.