The Inimitable Jeeves door P.G. Wodehouse

P.G. Wodehouse – The Inimitable Jeeves

(Een engels verslag van een Engels boek waar waarsch. nog wel vele fouten in staan, maar dan heb je toch een idee van de inhoud.)

The Inimitable Jeeves is the third book in a series of eighteen books about Jeeves and Bertie Wooster. I had never heard of the writer or of the book when I chose it
But I liked the cover of the book and the fact that it was a comical story. The book is written by the Englishman P.G. Wodehouse, a comic writer who enjoyed enormous success during a career of more than seventy years and continues to be widely read over 30 years after his death.

The book tells about “the adventures” of Bertie Wooster and his valet Jeeves. They live in an apartment in London City. Bertie is a minor British aristocrat, member of the "idle rich" and the Drones Club. Reginald Jeeves is a very intelligent person, everyone wants his opinion about everything.
The book isn’t really a story, it’s more like a collection of short stories, which turn out to be all the same when you read them…

There are two kinds of stories:
- Stories about aunt Agata.
- Stories about chap Bingo.
The stories about aunt Agata are about something she wants Bertie to do for her what he doesn’t like at all. For example, in one of the stories she asks him to come over to her hotel to meet a girl, Miss Hammingway which she likes. (She wants Bertie to get married as soon as possible) While they are staying there, aunt Agata’s jewels are stolen. She thinks the roommaid took them, but Jeeves and Bertie find out it was the girl, Miss Hammingway and her brother.
The stories about Bingo are about his lovelife. He constantly falls in love with other girls. But mostly his love affairs don’t work out as he wants. For example in the chapters “The Pride of the Woosters Is Wounded" and "The Hero's Reward” Bingo falls in love with Honoria, a rather mean woman, but he loves her, and thinks she’s an angel. Bingo and Jeeves want to help him by setting up a plan: Bertie will go on a walk with Honoria and her little nephew, and stop on the bridge for a little chat. Bertie will “accidentally” push the kid into the water and scream for help. Then Bingo has to appear out of the bushes, and save the kid. In that way, he will be a hero to Honoria. But the plan fails when Bingo doesn’t appear when he has to, so Bertie saves the kid and Honoria falls in love with him. (Something he doesn’t really like)

After a while he also gets engaged with her, something aunt Agata loves!
But happily, Jeeves can rescue his friend by talking to Honoria’s father and make Bertie look stupid and insufficient to marry.

The most important characters in the book are:
- Bertie, he is a lazy person and very depending on Jeeves in everything. He is noble, respectable but still single!
- Jeeves, he is a very smart person. He has an opinion about everything and everyone wants to know about it. He can help people out of anything and knows when to speak and when to remain silent.
- Bingo is a very weird person. He falls in love very quickly with all kinds of women, and I really mean ALL kinds… He also isn’t very smart, but he has his own opinion about that.
Aunt Agata is a very annoying person. Most of the time she is unreasonable and asks a lot of Bertie that he doesn’t want. Bertie has to listen to her because she is family and she is responsible for his inheritance!

I didn’t really like reading the book, because it’s an English book. I do like to read, but not in foreign languages. Because most of the time they use expressions that I don’t understand. A problem that I noticed, reading this book, was the use of old, formal English. I also think the book was a little bit boring; it wasn’t as comical as I expected.