It took me a long time to actually go through and read this book. It's a truly bizarre literary contraption. It reads as an unedited ramblings of an intelligent and witty, but otherwise stubborn English aristocratic fart. It is an autobiographical account of opium addict from the times, when the addictive properties of opium were not fully understood and you could buy stuff in a drug store. Essentially the dude got a toothache, which he attributed to not washing his face with cold water every morning (?!) so he did water his entire head one evening and ending up having a terrible cold. And so a friend recommends opium as relief (?!). As simple as that.
The best part of the book is the insight you get into the customs and thinking of the time; there is really nothing transcendental about this book, it is as deeply rooted in its time as it gets, together with all class, gender and racial prejudice. And then there is the great English wit. Witness this:
"Neither Coleridge nor Southey is a good reader of verse. Southey is admirable almost in all things, but not in this. Both he and Coleridge read as if crying, or at least wailing lugubriously."
"Positively, in one line of communication to the south of Holborn, for foot passengers (known, I doubt not, to many of my London readers), the road lay through a man's kitchen; and, as it was a small kitchen, you need to steer cautiously, or else you might run foul of the dripping pan."
"Turkish opium eaters, it seems, are absurd enough to sit, like so many equestrian statues, on logs of wood as stupid as themselves. But, that the reader may judge the degree in which opium is likely to stupefy the faculties of an Englishman, I shall (by way of treating the question illustratively rather than argumentatively) describe the way in which I myself often passed on opium evening in London during the period between 1804 and 1812."
And so on and on... Really fascinating stuff.
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