The Adventures of Baron Munchausen by Rudolf Erich Raspe
I first came across Baron Munchausen's stories as a child, and some of his tall tales will be familiar to most people in some way. But I'd never read the original classic work until now. That said, the version widely available today is not the "original", which was first published in 1785, and consisted only of several chapters. When Rudolf Erich Raspe (the likely author) published a second edition the following year, it included several other stories of the Baron's exploits. The story was sold off to another publisher, Kearsley, that same year, who effectively rewrote Raspe's stories and added still more. The original title of the 1785 edition was "Baron Munchausen's Narrative of His Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia", but by 1786 the longer edition was already circulating under titles like "The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen".
In 1792, a sequel detailing the Baron's adventures in Africa was published separately from an unknown author as "Volume Two of the Baron's Travels", and that's often packaged together with the stories about his adventures in Europe, under titles like "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen". What's more, even the very first edition of the book was inspired by older stories from classic sources. So what we have today has evolved over time.
It's also worthwhile knowing something about the history of how this book came about. Baron Munchausen was a very real German nobleman, named Hieronymus Karl Friedrich, Freiherr von Münchhausen (1720–1797), who was known for telling larger-than-life stories about his military career to his fellow aristocrats. Raspe never intended that his adventures were in any way biographical, but the Baron was certainly the inspiration for his fictional character.
Many of the incidents in these tall tales are memorable for their absurd humor: Munchausen faces a lion and a crocodile at once, which end up destroying each other; turns a wolf inside out; plays a frozen instrument as it thaws; rides a horse that keeps running after being cut in half by a castle gate; finds the same horse later tied to a church steeple after the snow melts; shoots a stag with a cherry pit and later sees a cherry tree sprouting from its head; rides a cannonball; and travels to the moon — twice. These have stood the test of time, though others feel simply silly, such as climbing a fast-growing plant to the moon or hoisting a carriage over his head to leap walls and hedges.
Many of these incidents will feel to the modern reader like they fail the common advice to writers ("show, don't tell"), and are told just briefly in a single paragraph, with little of an overarching narrative. Admittedly, this episodic tell-heavy style is typical of works in the oral tall-tale tradition, but as a result it can be a bit of a slog reading the whole thing in one sitting. Later chapters contain more worked out stories, but these are also less interesting. The sequel about the baron's adventures in Africa and America is generally considered to be somewhat of a satire on some of the travel narratives of explorer James Bruce, but to me it felt somewhat tedious and uninteresting compared with the original, and wasn't worth reading.
Despite these flaws, somehow the overall effect works, especially in the first part. The baron's astounding adventures seem even more wonderful given the deadpan delivery of them, and the bold insistence they are true. Later editions included a humorous endorsement from Gulliver, Aladdin, and Sinbad at the beginning, to confirm the authenticity. What better invitation could we get?
by EndersGame_Reviewer