Rod Fisher is not the author of this book. He is the "abridgerr" of Gil Blas. What is a Gil Blas? Killer shark? Fast car? Big storm? He hopes he will be considered the resuscitator of a young man on the road to Salamanca and not the murderer. The novel, "Gil Blas", which took Alain-René Lesage twenty years to write, has been relegated to the highest shelf in the dustiest far corner of most libraries. Shameful, but understandable.
Fisher felt it needed a more descriptive title to trigger the interest of contemporary readers. It was also much too long at over 300,000 words. In the early 18th Century it would have provided candlelight amusement for many evenings, like a TV series that runs for four seasons.
For the modern reader the rambling sentences and passive verbiage of the original novel can be daunting, especially in a book of 320,000 words. This adaptation is not a new translation. It is an abridged version of the original that has been ruthlessly slashed and edited. It is a sugar-coated introduction to the classic which may inspire the reader to tackle the original.
His many adventures with swindlers and bandits, and the many romantic entanglements should not be forgotten and shelf-bound by the archaic idiom of the Enlightenment Period. His story shocked that era's sensibilities—but in a genteel way. It might have been the "Lady Chatterly's Lover", the "Peyton Place" or "The Fifty Shades of Grey" of its time.