I feel like Juha is a “John Doe”
sort of character. Generic. A blank slate. It’s easier to tell a story about a man if
that man has a name, and so Juha exists.
Though the introduction to the book mentioned that Juha takes on many
professions and many attitudes, I was still a bit confused as I read the first
few anecdotes. I realized that my
problem was that I was trying to make a character out of Juha, one with
specific traits and habits. It was only
after I allowed myself to think of Juha less as a character, and more as a name
that can be applied to a range of characters, that I was able to relax and
enjoy the humor.
The humor itself, however, was
also sometimes problematic. While I
thought most of the anecdotes were either funny, clever, or both, some left me
a bit confounded. I feel like cultural
differences, the differences between now and the time that the tales take
place, and translations may have contributed to this. Usually, I could see where some people may
find something funny, or where the cognitive shift occurred (even if I wasn’t
amused myself), but a few times, I found myself somewhat mystified.
An example of this was the one
about selling the donkey that had wandered off.
Maybe the humor was that he wound up asking a higher price than he had originally
stated. But since he was also selling
the cat, I’m not sure that it would benefit him. Part of the problem is that I have no concept
of the money used in the tale. And why
is he selling the cat, anyways? What did
the cat do wrong? I digress.
Another interesting thing that I
noticed was that the cover of the book seems to depict a story I’ve heard
before. Since the introduction mentioned
that some of these stories are similar to Aesop’s Fables, I think I might be
right. Time will tell. :)
I think I’ll finish this post off
with my favorite quote from Juha so far:
“And what, after all, does man
take with him at last, when he dies?”
“Nothing.”
“…And this ‘nothing’ is the hard,
high price people don’t gain until it’s too late.”
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