Gargantua

La vie tres horrifique du grand Gargantua, père de Pantagruel jadis composée par M. Alcofribas abstracteur de quinte essence. Livre plein de Pantagruelisme according to François Juste's 1542 edition, or simply Gargantua, is the second novel by François Rabelais, published in 1534 or 1535. Similar in structure to Pantagruel (1532), but written in a more complex style, it recounts the years of apprenticeship and the warlike exploits of the giant Gargantua. A plea for a humanist culture against the ponderousness of a rigid Sorbonnard education, Gargantua is also a novel full of verve, lexical richness, and often crude writing. Rabelais published Gargantua under the same pseudonym as Pantagruel: Alcofribas Nasier (an anagram of François Rabelais), "abstractor of quinte essence".