Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #16639 in Books
• Published on: 2003-08-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 464 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780486432151
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Customer Reviews

A highwayscribery "Book Report"

"Moby Dick" is such a tough climb that you can miss a lot of the scenery on the way up.

Like Mount Everest, with "Moby Dick" there's no denying the presence of greatness, but wrapping yourself around it is another question.

It is a symptom of how low the reading public has fallen in highwayscribery's estimation that the famed novel's solid reputation comes as something of a surprise.

Are people still reading this book?

Herman Melville's prose is dense and rich and hard work to absorb. That said, it would not be going out on a limb, given the classic's status, to say the effort is worth the while.

Hung from the author's whale tale are many meditations on the human (and animal!) condition and his prolific output and textured life inform them beautifully.

"Moby Dick" has so much to give, but one must wonder whether Melville could even find a publisher in today's environment.

Last year, this scribe entered his latest effort, "The Sidewalk Smokers Club," into the "Writer's Digest" book contest. That particular competition and publication seem rooted in the academic wing of today's American literary universe, their contents and judgments fueled by so many masters and mistresses of fine arts.

In any case, the book "scored" well without passing to the next round. The judge had problems with the "loss of momentum" that took place when the highway scribe's alter ego, Stephen Siciliano, intermittently and briefly, digressed from his yarn and extrapolated certain goings-on in the story to the larger universe surrounding.

That judge never read "Moby Dick."

In the epic, Melville's actual "story" might be told using one-fifth the pages he actually presses from his fevered mind: The narrator gets on a whaling boat for cash and adventure, but is unwittingly enlisted in Captain Ahab's mad quest to end the life of Moby Dick and avenge the white beast's severing of his leg.

Along the way, however, the reader is treated to voluminous information about the cetaceous species, "Cetaceous," being an expression the scribe did not know until attacking this tome.

Right whale, humpback whale, gray whale, and sperm whale - the particular star of "Moby Dick" -- all get their due. And not a perspective rendered from some distant boat deck mind you, but from the inside out, from mouth to blow-hole, to the tippy-tippy "fluke" (more cetaceous vocabulary).

And this is good, for books should inform us of things we thought we knew more about, especially in the case of the whale, which is Melville's point, as it is the largest living animal and a subject of remarkable strength, grace, and symbolism.

But such discourse, however edifying, does serve to break-up the narrative -- a lot.

And those who haven't worked much on a 19th Century commercial sailing vessel will find the preponderance of nautical terms daunting.

Spar, gunwhale, leeward, and aft, chocks, mizzen Donner and Blitzen, it's all rather hard to keep track of so that the uninitiated is tempted to "read through" the detailed renderings of seafaring equipment in an effort to get on with the story.

And that's a lot of skimming.

If our democracy grants everybody an opinion and permits an unknown writer to pass judgment upon a national treasure, highwayscribery would venture that "Moby Dick" is better in many of its parts than it is as a whole and integrated artistic work.

There...we said it.

Melville is muscular and poetic, scientific and rigorous, cultured and biblical in his writerly search for life's truths through the prism of an ocean adventure.

In highwayscribery's favorite passage, the monomaniacal Ahab talks with the severed head of a whale his crew hunted a day earlier:

"Speak, thou vast and venerable head," muttered Ahab, "which though ungarnished with beard, yet here and there look hoary with mosses, speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid the world's foundation. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou has been where bell or diver never went; has slept by many a sailor's side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Thou saw'st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sunk beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them..."

It is one of several stunning meditations on the sea's mysteries. Also a reminder of how much knowledge both above and below the ocean's surface is beyond man's reach, and of the ever-present perils that dearth of information poses.

Melville's Pequod, boat and motley crew alike, are a dark vision, something out of Burning Man, a world beat symphony 100 years before Bob Marley that accrues flavors as it traverses the earth's diverse quadrants, dark and desperate, aboriginal and Quaker, murderous and hungry and vulnerable, too.

Like many of the big books Moby requires not so much a second reading as a scholarly commitment to its multi-layered method and madness, a love affair, a small piece of your life, for in crafting it, Melville clearly gave a piece of his own.

I feel this is an enjoyable read,
Simply put, it takes good general knowledge/education to appreciate all the symbolism, imagery, and metaphor in this book (and even then you still will probably miss something that's been written). I won't get into all that because it's been beaten to death elsewhere. The other thing to remember is that Herman Melville himself served aboard a whaler. Maybe that's why he found it necessary to write about every last detail about life aboard a 19th century whaler. Otherwise yes, if you just are hungry for the story you probably could get away with reading the first and last hundred pages. That being said I found this a very enjoyable read. The chapters like some other reviews have mentioned are for the most part brief and go fast. And I think you will enjoy even the rather dry parts if you are a history buff like myself. Maybe like myself this book should be read at a distance from your formal education, that way your life experience/knowledge I feel will help in its enjoyment and interpretation, and you can come to your own conclusions about how much is really going on here, without the fear of getting a bad grade!

The frustration, the grandeur
If it were possible to simultaneously give a book one star and five stars, this book would deserve it. It's easy to see how people could hate it, and any teacher who assigns it is either brilliant or as mad as Captain Ahab. Being forced to read this could only be punishment. A friend of mine who had to read years ago said it read like a whaling encyclopedia with a short story injected into it. This is pretty accurate. Indeed, the overwhelming amount of whaling data broke Melville's streak of commercially successful novels and his popularity never recovered in his lifetime.

For the first eighty or so pages, it comes across as probably the queerest of nineteenth-century American novels, but then suddenly there is a chapter outlining all known whales and their physical characteristics. This is followed by chapters discussing things like the awfulness of Moby Dick's whiteness, which includes an exhausting list of every symbolic connotation for the color white that Melville can remember. And it doesn't stop. Ninety pages towards the end, when the Pequod finally encounters a ship that has recently spotted Moby Dick, you'd expect the next chapter to describe the crew racing to Ahab's nemesis. But no! There is a discussion of the skeleton of whales, including physical measurements and the location of known skeletons (like the whale museum in Hull, England). Not kidding. And then towards the end the dialogue starts sounding like Shakespeare and becomes extremely difficult to understand. I guess this was trying to convey a sense of tragedy, but it violates the realism the work had up to that point. In short, historians of nineteenth-century sailing might wet themselves over all the detail about onboard life, but it's easy to imagine a coerced student crying in mind-numbed frustration instead. And if more people could get through it, there would be a lot more one-stars. But they give up and don't write reviews.

Okay, so that's why someone might hate this novel. But let's say you've read the sea stories of Joseph Conrad or Patrick O'Brian or simply have an overactive imagination and some patience. This doesn't feel like a novel as much as a relentless succession of brilliant images. Like the shark frenzy around the whale carcass tied to the ship or the little hole in the deck where Ahab secures his peg leg or the deck tilting at such an acute angle as the weight of the whale pulls down one side of the ship, or Moby Dick coming up out of the deep, starting with this little white blur. Melville seems perfectly aware of how powerful these images are when he abandons all pretense of plot and writes experimental chapters that read a lot---a lot---like mood-establishing excerpts from modern screenplays.

My favorite part is a chapter called rather innocently "The line". It describes in painstaking detail where all the rope is stored in the little boats used to attack the whales. Then it describes how that line unfurls once a harpooned whale tries to flee. The rope goes flying off so fast---smoke comes off of it---that the crew momentarily feels like it is trapped inside a steam engine. My description is clumsy, but the chapter is brilliant. But it's hard to process all the brilliance because the chapter is where it mentions in passing that these attack boats are made out of wood a half inch thick---the same thickness as my bookcases---and they're going after the largest toothed predators on the planet. I would have to say that it's the only novel I've read that's so vivid that I could `hear' a soundtrack to it.

And the feeling you get that Moby Dick didn't only get Ahab's leg but also swallowed Wikipedia somewhere along the line? Personally, I felt that the long descriptions of sea life helped with the pacing, that they gave the sense of the passage of time, of giving the Pequod the opportunity of crossing half the planet.

I'm pretty sure everyone who might read this novel knows the ending, but I was still floored by it when I read it. Knowing what happens doesn't protect you against the suspense. Once I was done with it, I felt battered and bruised myself, torn between a sense of "That was amazing" and "Please don't ever ask me to read another line of Melville again in my life." But it's been over a week since I finished it and its images linger. I've started to accept that sooner or later, I will read it again.

So this is a high risk book, provoking strong reactions. But Thrift Dover edition is all but giving the book away, so it's not an expensive risk. (The font size could afford to be slightly bigger, but it's not a huge issue.)