It's not REALLY the "Complete Works" since it doesn't included Carroll's "Symbolic Logic" but, HEY!, that's just nit-picking. I read it all, all 1293 pages. I didn't like it all as much as the Alice material but it was all worth reading (sez I). ( )

I found this in a bookstore in Myrtle Beach and was ecstatic. It had "The Hunting of the Snark", which I h ad heard of, but never read, and the Sylvie and Bruno books, which I had never even heard about, with a other stuff that was all bonus.

Sylvie and Bruno are nothing like Alice. They are, frankly, very sweet.

I particularly dug the Sillygisms after I had taken Logic in college, five years later.

I have had to buy a second copy and it is pretty beat up, but I'm not willing for it to be absent from my bookshelf. ( )

Opera omnia di Lewis Carroll: fiabe, poesie, racconti, enigmi matematici ( )

I've limited myself to reading the parts The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. For no other reason than that after reading those two, I (for now) had had enough of Alice's adventures and all the wondrous creatures, talking and acting strangely.

It was a nice book and while reading it, I realized that I had read it (in Dutch) before as a child. Of course I would have, because I've been a book worm my whole life. I just had forgotten about this particular book.
It was nice to refresh my memory. ( )

(Original Review, 1994-08-10)

I’ve always interpreted “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” as a (modern) Fairytale.

In a way most of modern commercial movies are more like classical fairytales: very elemental stories set in a simplistic moral universe, with stereotypical characters. The movies may seem to be more complex but that is mostly 'effect'. Movies are very good at the dazzle part of the story telling business. Complexity of story: very much less so.

It is an interesting point though: the differences between stories that were only meant to be told and the kind of stories we have invented and/or developed the moment we could write them down. It is, for instance, suggested that the flowery & repeated descriptors in Homer (rose-fingered dawn, wine-coloured sea et cetera) were part aide-memoirs and part moments that the storyteller didn't have to think about the next word. They were, in other words, part of the mechanics/structure of the story. Something that was no longer needed when people could write the stories down.

So, stories from the oral age have, by necessity, a different shape than later stories like Alice’s. Come to think of it, in a way it's similar to watching a movie in a theatre or a DVD at home. In the theatre you can't pause or rewind: you have to follow the 'story' in the moment. Same with oral and written stories. Around the campfire both storyteller and audience are engaged in a live stream event. You can't have your audience interrupting you, asking you to explain who is who again and wasn't X killed by that cyclops or was that Y...? A written story can have more complexity, because readers can take a break. Try to do “Shogun” as an oral story...

Still, fairytales are probably among the first type of story told and lots of modern stories still carry that DNA. Yes, some modern literature has as much in common with fairytales as birds with dinosaurs but they are still related. More to the point, we wouldn't have birds without those dinos. You could argue we wouldn't have either James Clavell or Marcel Proust without those old oral stories (and fairytales) too...

I think we can discount the druggie and Freudian interpretations as modern fantasies*. But otherwise it is clearly satirical at different levels (the boring schoolroom, linguistic philosophy) while alluding to events and places and presumably people in Alice's life. In a way it's the sort of story that we all make up for our children and grandchildren, but cleverer than most.

(*) So here's mine: There is a convincing theory that Carroll emphasized his relations with little girls (which in the Victorian mindset were necessarily innocent and asexual) to distract attention from his numerous relationships with young (20ish) women which the Victorians would have thought improper for a clergyman. So he sends Alice off down a hole and prattles on about her adventures while having it away with Dinah on the surface. Mind you, it’s just a theory… ( )