My review:
A brilliant book, possibly my favourite of all the books I have read, which is a lot, and certainly one that I have enjoyed re-reading time and again. Tragic that it wasn't more widely appreciated in Melville's lifetime. A must read.
A brilliant book, possibly my favourite of all the books I have read, which is a lot, and certainly one that I have enjoyed re-reading time and again. Tragic that it wasn't more widely appreciated in Melville's lifetime. A must read.
And many of the chapters essentially nonfiction, a sort of encyclopaedia of Whales and Whaling.
"Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way!"
Similar with Count of Monte Cristo as well, the details of the Mediterranean smuggling trade it goes into is simply amazing.
(I love all of Dumas' works)
Which certainly did not improve it as a novel.
Lots of good Victorian writing is like that
Charles Dickens - Any of his works
Rudyard Kipling - Remembered now for children’s books but also wrote some amazing novels and poetry for adults. He has written some pretty trippy stuff too. I remember a poem about all the structural parts of a ship talking to each other in a storm and another short story about an engineer that’s a sort of fever dream mixed with a monsoon flood at the bridge he’s building.
Oscar Wilde - e.g. The Nightingale and the Rose is a masterwork of pathos. http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/NigRos.shtm...
A lot of literature from that period paid attention to the the rhythm and flow of the sentences, if you read any of it aloud it rolls off the tongue compared to modern writing.
I usually read a book in a couple of sittings. This favors lighter fare, with copious excitement to keep one engaged.
I could never do this with Moby Dick. But with a 10-30 page reading per day, you hear about some interesting thing: perhaps mostly whaling and sailing, perhaps advancing the plot and characters. It's not enough to sustain an excited big read, but it's certainly enough to make you wonder about what you'll read next.
The chapters average 3-4 pages long. I think this is a hint that it's intended to be consumed in morsels.
When I was a child, I have read Moby Dick and I have enjoyed every part of it very much, including the so-called boring parts about the history of whaling and so on.
At that age most of what was described in the book were new things for me, so they were interesting.
Half a century later, I would never have patience to read any similar book, as it is extremely unlikely that any such book could contain anything that I have not read before.