The Decameron (Penguin Classics)

But this framing technique of ten narrators is hardly the point. The star of this work are the tales told by these sequestered characters. These 100 stories are chillingly sneaky in how they will mess with your mind. At first the tales will appear shocking, overtly sexual, or even knee-slappingly funny. (Think "Monty Python.") But in fact, like Aesop, the great Italian prose author Boccaccio tucks an ambiguous, gnawing moral into each tale. You will laugh at first, and then the bittersweet truth of each story's lesson will zap you.

The true brillance of "The Decameron" is that it is kaleidoscopic in nature: while all the tales are somewhat similar to one another, each story is truly unique in how it aligns its characters, its structure, its action, and its moral. The basic ingredients are similar in dozens of stories, and yet their outcomes prove to be wholly different. So instead of getting "re-runs," you the reader wind up in a quicksand-like universe where some good-hearted characters are punished, others rewarded, and some scoundrely characters are quashed while other soar.

It is Boccaccio's humorous (yet ultimately grim) portrait of our herky-jerky, you-never-know world, where a person can never be sure of his destiny despite his conduct, that makes this work brilliant. Behind the ribaldry and the chuckles, this late-medieval author proves that our world (sometimes benevolent, sometimes cruel, but always inscrutable) is, indeed, nothing but a human comedy.


Escape to the Fabulous Fourteenth Century   May 17, 2000
oh_pete (Cambridge. MA USA)
28 out of 28 found this review helpful

Giovanni Boccaccio is one of the three supreme literary masters of the Italian Renaissance--sharing those laurels with Dante and Petrarch--and he is also the most accessible. Written in the 1350s, in the wake of the worst part of the Black Plague (which would kill off one-third of Europe's population), THE DECAMERON is a collection of one hundred surprisingly light, hilariously funny and frequently bawdy short stories. In his preface, Boccaccio claims to have intended them to entertain Italian women who spent most of their lives indoors. Seven young Florentine ladies and three young gentlemen sojourn together to a Tuscan villa to escape the contagion-filled city. They pass each of their ten days in the picturesque countryside with long walks, good food and wine, jovial games, and oh yes, telling stories. Each of them is crowned queen or king for a day and gets to choose the order of the telling. This framework combined with the beautifully described rural setting makes the reader, too, feel warm, welcome, and one of the party.

Boccaccio indulges in a popular form of satire against the foul and corrupt members of the fourteenth century clergy--one of the ten actually admits that it's "too easy" to pick on such scoundrels. With humor and the power of shame he attacks both the hypocrisy of the clergy and the hypocrisy toward which the Catholic Church's sexually repressive laws drove people. Here we find a group of nuns fighting over the sexual favors of the convent gardener; there a wily cleric indulges his prurient urges by convincing a foolish woman that he is the Angel Gabriel; still another adulteress cows her angry husband by claiming he is not enough to satisfy her lust--is it fair that she throw the surplus to the dogs? But the prize is taken by the hermit who persuades a young girl that there's only ONE WAY to fight the devil! Quite often one or another of the chaste storytelling party finishes a tale of illicit pleasure on a note of "May we, too, always have our desires fulfilled." THE DECAMERON is not all lust and corruption, of course, there are tales of great bravery and loyalty in the face of high odds. Great sacrifices are made, fortunate coincidences occur, true faith is rewarded.

THE DECAMERON is easy to dip into again and again and feel rewarded every time. It is impossible to read these wonderful stories without thinking that Boccaccio was enjoying himself inordinately as he wrote them. However he may revel in the permissiveness brought on by the terror of the Plague, much more importantly does he praise life and love and passion as precious and worth grabbing. Boccaccio's generation had certainly seen enough of pain and suffering and death, after all--we should begrudge them nothing.

One of the world's finest literary treasures, THE DECAMERON belongs on the shelf of everyone who loves great storytelling.


A Book of Laughter   March 28, 2001
Gregory N. Hullender (Bellevue, WA USA)
24 out of 24 found this review helpful

Ten young Florentine noblemen and women escaping the Black Death in Florence in 1348 entertain themselves by each relating a story per day for ten days - 100 entertaining stories in all, mostly set in and around medieval Florence. Although famously naughty, none of these stories strikes a modern reader as more than mildly erotic. Rather, they consistently astonish by their thoroughly modern message that women are as good as men, nobility doesn't come from birth, sanctity doesn't come from the church, and - above all - true love must never be denied. Amazingly, Boccaccio often delivers this message while pretending to say the exact opposite; sometimes he presents very sympathetic characters who get away with things thought scandalous in his time, offering a mere token condemnation at the end, while other times he depicts someone actually following the accepted code and committing some horrible act of cruelty in the process. Either way - and despite his claims to be upholding convention - we always know what he really means, and apparently he didn't fool too many people in his own day either.

But one doesn't need to focus on the revolutionary aspects of the Decameron to enjoy the book; each of the stories delights the reader with a different tasty morsel, and, you can read as much or as little at a time as you please. Once you get past the introduction, (and that's probably the most serious part of the book, so be sure not to give up before you get to the first story) the stories will make you laugh, make you cringe, and make you sit on the edge of your seat. Inspiring authors from Chaucer to Shakespeare and entertaining audiences for over 700 years, the Decameron continues to delight.


A True Classic   October 8, 2000
30 out of 32 found this review helpful

Any book defined as a true classic is likely to be thought of as stultifying and incomprehensible...at best. Yet, there are dozens and dozens of books that are true classics and still manage to speak to today's modern audience. Boccaccio's Decameron is one such book.

The Decameron was written around 1350 during an outbreak of plague in Florence. It is the fictional account of ten young people who flee the city to a country manor house and, in an effort to keep themselves occupied and diverted, begin telling stories.

Ten days pass in the pages of the Decameron (hence its name), and each person tells one story per day, making a total of one hundred stories. These are stories that explore a surprisingly wide range of moral, social and political issues whose wit and candor will probably surprise most modern readers. The topics explored include: problems of corruption in high political office, sexual jealousy and the class differences between the rich and the poor.

The titles themselves are both imaginative and fun. One story is titled, "Masetto da Lamporecchio Pretends to be Deaf and Dumb in Order to Become a Gardener to a Convent of Nuns, Where All the Women Eagerly Lie With Him." And, although the title, itself, is a pretty good summary of the story, even a title such as this cannot adequately convey Boccaccio's humor and wit.

Another story that seems surprisingly modern is, "Two Men are Close Friends, and One Lies With the Other's Wife. The Husband Finds it Out and Makes the Wife Shut Her Lover in a Chest, and While He is Inside, the Husband Lies With the Lover's Own Wife on the Chest." A bit long for today's modern world, perhaps, where popular books are dominated by titles such as John Grisham's The Firm, but the outcome of this story is as socially-relevant today as anything that happened in fourteenth-century Florence.

The Decameron, however, goes far beyond plain, bawdy fun and takes a close look at a society that is unraveling due to the devastating effects of the plague. The people in Boccaccio's time suffered terribly and the book's opening pages show this. The clergy was, at best, inept and, more often than not, corrupt. Those who had the misfortune to fall ill (and this includes just about everyone) were summarily abandoned by both their friends and family.

Those looking for something representative of the social ills of Boccaccio's day will find more than enough interesting tidbits and asides in these stories. Serious students of literature will find the ancestors of several great works of fiction in these pages and readers in general cannot fail to be entertained by the one hundred stories spun by these ten refugees on their ten lonely nights.


100+1 tales= a great book.   January 28, 2001
Sergio Flores (Orange, CA United States)
19 out of 19 found this review helpful

I had to read a good part of "The Decameron" last quarter and I have gone back to read more stories from it even though the Fall quarter is over. This is a great book: funny, entertaining, subtly revolutionary, insightful, and superbly well-written. Approach it without fear. It is a Classic, but it will have you laughing, thinking, and learning far better than any current best-seller. Anyone with an interest in journalism and/or history will profit from Boccaccio's Introduction, at the beginning of the First Day. His description of the Plague in Florence is vivid and gripping, and this eventually provides the background for the setting of the one hundred and one tales that seven young women and three young men will narrate in a villa away from the dying city. Also, the Introduction to the Fourth Day presents the reader with an unfinished, but hilarious story about a man who has been kept away from women. This story is what my teacher called the 101st, and I have to agree with her.

Do not think that all "The Decameron" deals with is sex. The mostly illicit sexual encounters depicted are some times funny, sometimes sad, but they share a common trait with the stories from the Tenth Day, for example (these ones are mostly about sacrifice, abnegation, and servitude), or with those of the Second: Boccaccio's concern for his society and the terrible tensions that had reached a breaking point by the 14th century. The Plague, in Boccaccio's universe, acts as a catalyst of emotions, desires, and changes that had to come.

Read, then, about Alibech putting the Devil back in Hell, Lisabetta and her pot of basil, Ser Ceperello and his "saintly" life, Griselda and her incredible loyalty in spite of the suffering at the hands of a God-like husband, Tancredi and his disturbing love for his daughter, Masetto and the new kind of society he helps create with some less-than-religious nuns, and then it will be easier to understand why Boccaccio is so popular after 650 years. And although it may be skipped by most readers, do not miss the Translator's (G. M. McWilliam) introduction on the history of "The Decameron" proper, and that of its many, and mostly unfortunate, translations into English. This book is one of the wisest, most economic ways of obtaining entertainment and culture. Do not miss it.