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“To convey an adequate idea of a book of such various merits as that which the author of Typee and Omoo has here placed before the reading public, is impossible
by blululu 5y ago
“To convey an adequate idea of a book of such various merits as that which the author of Typee and Omoo has here placed before the reading public, is impossible in the scope of a review. High philosophy, liberal feeling, abstruse metaphysics popularly phrased, soaring speculation, a style as many-coloured as the theme, yet always good, and often admirable; fertile fancy, ingenious construction, playful learning, and an unusual power of enchaining the interest, and rising to the verge of the sublime, without overpassing that narrow boundary which plunges the ambitious penman into the ridiculous; all these are possessed by Herman Melville, and exemplified in these volumes.”
Could not agree more 170 years later. My girlfriend and I are currently reading the book aloud to each other before bed and almost every page is a master work of the English language.
- pieix 5y agoThis review is a fantastic reproduction of Melville's style in Moby-Dick. It must have been intentional, and tongue-in-cheek!
- scop 5y agoI am also reading it for the first time right now. I am absolutely blown away by it. It has an energy to it that is difficult to convey, as if it was written by a mad man all in one sitting. There are sentences or paragraphs that go on and and on I find myself thinking "Ok Melville went a little too far here" and then, by golly, he brings it all together in a flourish. The language is simultaneously as descriptive as anything I've read, yet curiously opaque. It's perhaps best described by a passage from a novel of similar linguistic stature, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian: > It was the judge and the imbecile. They were both of them naked and they neared through the desert dawn like beings of a mode little more than tangential to the world at large, their figures now quick with clarity and now fugitive in the strangeness of that same light. Like things so charged with meaning that their forms are dimmed.
- defen 5y agoMcCarthy lists Moby-Dick as his favorite book [1]. The otherwise-impenetrable sentence "The Dipper stove." from the first page of Blood Meridian will be immediately understandable to anyone familiar with early 19th century whaling expeditions. [1] https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/17/specials/mccarthy-venom.html?_r=2 https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/17/s...
- everybodyknows 5y agoI don't know what Melville thought of Shakespeare, but we can trace a stylistic line through Meridian, Moby Dick, Macbeth. All three have a mad project of egotistic ambition, sooth-sayers of doom, and great helpings of gore along the way to the catastrophe foretold. Sooth-sayers are of course, always correct, whether they appear as a trio of witches, world-weary Parsee, or a decrepit "disordered Mennonite".
- scop 5y ago“otherwise-impenetrable” is a great way of characterizing McCarthy and Melville. Often I am left mystified at what I just read, but have sensed something of great weight and gravity…I suppose that’s life, eh?