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“Call Me Ishmael”
I love to read. Always have. I’ve probably read hundreds of books. Starting with our family’s World Book encyclopedias and aging Tom Swift melodramas through a forest of sci-fi and non-fiction. Plus, whenever I drive, I love to listen to books. I’ve used Audible to listen to the latest offerings and LibriVox for older in-the-public-domain works.
Recently turning 58, I started to think it was high time I tackled some of the classics that I’ve shunned my entire life. Why have I shunned these tomes? I’m ashamed to say they looked too heavy, in literary depth as well as weight. But, chastising myself for being such a lazy lout, I’ve started to take on these “serious” titles. For instance, I’m a few pages into the infamous War and Peace after having read a scholarly volume about the Napoleonic wars from a Russian viewpoint.
But, getting back to the title of my post, I’ve just completed listening to Melville’s Moby Dick, or the Whale as read by a wonderful reciter by the name of Stewart Wills. If it had not been for the precise and melodious elocution of Mr. Wills, I don’t think I could have gotten through those 135 chapters and epilogue.
I’m no literary scholar and I won’t attempt to parse Melville very deeply other than to say that he must have been an interminable bore at parties. I mean, whole chapters dedicated to whales as captured in art through history? Another on every aspect of the word “white?” It goes on and on. Yet, I was riveted by every word. And it came to me, by the end, that this book has nothing and everything to do with 19th-century whaling.
How could it be both? I don’t know, but Melville must have been a genius. I now feel as though I have enough whaling knowledge to match any salty Nantucketer. But also, never, in any horror movie, have I been closer to simultaneously understanding and abhorring a man’s descent into insanity. My previous popular-but-vague perception of Ahab had been that he was an evil tyrannical ship’s captain bent on destroying himself and his crew. But I knew nothing. Melville’s depiction of a man’s mind being torn in two left me unexpectedly moved. I was motivated to pity him, to loathe him, to empathize with him.
How do I sum this ramble up? First, I whole heartedly recommend this LibriVox recording. Thank you Mr. Wills. Secondly, Melville, you magnificent [expletive], I read your book (or at least listened to it.) Third, maybe I’ll have given someone else the courage to take on a long-avoided work of literature.
Published in Literature
Marcel Proust’s what? Did you fall asleep typing?
Read it, you will come out better for the experience.
Even the people who know me best would hardly call me a cynic. I suppose that we’re just going to have to disagree about the merits of Moby Dick.
My family is from Nantucket, so it’s against the law for me to say something bad about Herman Melville or his works.
But it is a, ahem, challenge to read that leaves most readers with the impression, accurate, that Melville was paid for length, not brevity.
When you’re paid by the word, you’re going to use a lot of them. Not saying that Melville was, you understand.
You know, I had always assumed that it was published as a serial, as was Dickens. I guess it’s not true. Melville wasn’t paid for monthly installments like Dickens. He’s just monstrously wordy without that encouragement. :)
Alexandre Dumas was paid by the column inch. That is why a lot of his paragraphs have one sentence with one to three words. Stuff like:
“He said that?”
“Yes”
“Incredible”
“It’s true!”
What to do, then?”
Why, charge!
Twelve words – one column inch.
Seawriter
Unmentioned as of yet is all the humor in Moby Dick. In particular, the chapters on whaling satirize the pretensions of the narrator, or perhaps the pretensions of the typological biblical criticism of Melville’s day.
How can you not smile the whole time you are reading this? :)
BTW, if you ever thought A Tale of Two Cities was boring, get the Audible edition read by Andrew Sachs. Absolutely brilliant vocal acting.
I’ll pass. I still have flashbacks of wading through that in high school. Dickens is the most over rated author since Melville. (Don’t tell my family I said that.)
No doubt about it, certain books aren’t good in certain situations. I can personally recommend never reading The Death of Ivan Illych on an airplane. Tolstoy didn’t have a lot to say about air travel, but his depiction of death is just way too convincing. Similarly never give The Magic Mountain to someone in bed with a chest cold or the flu. You may think you’re doing them a favor. But you’re not. You sadistic bastard. Why not give them a recording of La Boheme to play when they’ve tired of reading while you’re at it if you really hate them? Also The Metamorphosis or Bartleby the Scrivener or the Aubrey/Maturin book where Maturin has whatever godawful fever it was (did this to myself a couple of years ago racked with fever and chills) will not cheer an invalid, it simply won’t. On the other hand E.T.A. Hoffmann stories in combination with codeine cough syrup and a high fever is interesting. But really gilding the lily, like taking LSD and going to see Fantasia.
This is my favorite Dickens novel.
It is Great Expectations I struggle with. Moby Dick is a good story, I just don’t think I can wade through the words to understand what Melville wants me to take away. Same as GE. Maybe when I am older, and time and distraction are not issues, I may appreciate both more, like Doctor Robert. But for now, the scant attention I can pay to a wall of text kind of necessitates points arising quickly.
I love this performance of Father Mapple by Orson Welles:
I first saw the movie sited when I was too young to read the novel. The scene with Orson Welles remained permanently was embedded in my mind so that each time I read the book I see Orson Welles as he played the character. The entire scene is extremely true to the text right down to the minister climbing ratlines to get up to his pulpit. It was a marvelous film. Gregory Peck’s Ahab was a work of genius.
I’m sorry, but I really like Orson Welles and even he couldn’t make that scene not be excruciatingly boring.
Boring? Boring? I’m a few chapters into “War and Peace” now and if I have to read through one more French-laden scene of these boring characters visiting each other in their salons, I’m gonna need resuscitation. W&P makes MD read like an action-packed car chase from cover to cover.
I didn’t think W&P was that bad, though I listened to it rather than read it. I liked it better than I liked Anna Karenina. I have to say that I wasn’t ready for a two hour disquisition on free will at the end.
I don’t understand you guys.
Moby Dick isn’t boring.
There’s a couple hundred pages of exposition, character setting, mood defining and whale learning. Followed by 100 pages of the most thrilling dramatic writing in the American canon.
I read the three days of The Chase (chapters 133-35 in MD) in three days the first time. This time, I intend to do it at one sitting.
And Melville was not paid by the word nor was MD a serial novel. He wrote it in longhand in Pittsfield MA, sending copies to publishers in London and NYC. Meaning that he had to copy it out at least thrice…unless he hired Bartelby the Scrivener to help!
Your ramble is music to my ears! I’m late to this post, but I love books too. I too, have started grabbing books that have graced my bookshelves for years, thanks to my sister. She scours libraries sales, Goodwill, yard sales. throughout the backwoods of the mountain towns and Amish country of MD and PA. I’m the recipient of her goldmines. I love Agatha Christie, have found spy novels, novels on WWII written by those who were there, the Peter Mayle series, now I just started Station Wagon in France by Francis Parkinson Keyes. I grab books by Ellery Queen, Mother Theresa, C.S. Lewis, Brad Thor, lots of CIA history books, American history, and even children’s books with wonderful drawings like The Wind and the Willows – I’m catching up too – and enjoying every minute. The back porch on an autumn afternoon is a great place to catch up!!