Gargantua and Pantagruel, Book IV: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

Gargantua and Pantagruel, Book IV, credited to François Rabelais, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of Gargantua and Pantagruel, Book IV by François Rabelais. (Translated by John Ozell; Peter Antony Motteux.) Read in English by Thomas A. Copeland This fourth in the five novels about the giants Pantagruel and his father Gargantua is the last novel indusputably attributed to François Rabelais. Seeking an answer to doubts arising in the previous novel, Pantagruel and his friends go to sea to find an oracle (the Holy Bottle). Their adventures provide many opportunities for satire, the most effective being against intolerance, credulity, and cowardice, with Pantagruel himself always affording a calm center of sanity and equilibrium. As the sea and the islands teem with monsters and madmen, so the style erupts: Nearly endless lists tumble out, nonsense words of 20-30 syllables challenge the tongue and baffle the mind, and recondite learning spills with hilarity onto the page. The author's imagination appears to explode with jokes, nonsense, flights of fancy, frivolities, and fun, held loosely together by a set of well-defined characters and a silly quest. (Summary by Thomas A. Copeland)

Recording facts

• Recording title: Gargantua and Pantagruel, Book IV
• Author credits: François Rabelais
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 9
• Listed recording duration: 7:07:06

Catalogue topics

• satire
• humor
• burlesque
• tall tales

Track guide

1. 00 - Section 0: Front Matter — 57:30
2. 01 - Section 1 — 52:09
3. 02 - Section 2 — 38:24
4. 03 - Section 3 — 41:47
5. 04 - Section 4 — 45:44
6. 05 - Section 5 — 42:20
7. 06 - Section 6 — 42:25
8. 07 - Section 7 — 49:35
9. 08 - Section 8 — 57:12

Listen to this recording

Open the complete recording and player on Internet Archive. The player includes the full track list and available download formats.

Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.