Yes, that Moby-Dick. The original. The one with crazy, obsessed Ahab and the mysterious white whale and "Call me Ishmael" and Queequeg the friendly cannibal. The one that was apparently greeted upon its publication in 1851 with a collective, head-scratching "Huh?" and only seventy years later became recognized as a bona fide literary masterpiece.
It's a wonderfully weird book, Moby-Dick. Ishmael, the narrator, is constantly digressing from the story to ponder the color white, for instance, or to list and describe the known species of whales, or to consider the history of whales in art. And occasionally, seemingly out of nowhere, the book transforms into a drama, complete with stage directions, dialogue, monologues, and asides.
It's funny, too, downright hilarious in some parts (especially toward the beginning.) I didn't know that before I started reading it. Nobody talks much about Moby-Dick as being funny, playful, experimental, or fun to read, but it is very much all these things. Which is not to say it doesn’t get gloomy and serious, too. (Spoiler alert: the ship sinks and almost everybody dies.) It’s a lot of things, all at once. When I picked it up off the shelf and decided it was finally time to dive in, I expected to find a dusty, dense, difficult tome that felt like work to get through. It’s definitely a commitment (it took me about two months) and you might need a hand deciphering some of the historical and literary references (this annotated online version is a great help), but if your experience is anything like mine, it will feel more like an adventure than a burden.
For the two months I spent with Moby-Dick, I was entertained, challenged, surprised, and caught up in a grand tale. I was repeatedly moved by the sheer beauty of Herman Melville’s peerless writing (the whale, “gliding at high noon through a dark blue sea leav[es] a milky-way wake of creamy foam, all spangled with golden gleamings”), and struck by the intriguing questions the book raises about fate, obsession, the limits of our knowledge, and our complex relationship to nature.
In all, reading Moby-Dick was a great reminder that every once in a while, it’s a good idea to pick up one of those classics that everybody’s heard about but that not many people actually read anymore, and see what made it a classic in the first place. What you find might surprise you.
It's a wonderfully weird book, Moby-Dick. Ishmael, the narrator, is constantly digressing from the story to ponder the color white, for instance, or to list and describe the known species of whales, or to consider the history of whales in art. And occasionally, seemingly out of nowhere, the book transforms into a drama, complete with stage directions, dialogue, monologues, and asides.
It's funny, too, downright hilarious in some parts (especially toward the beginning.) I didn't know that before I started reading it. Nobody talks much about Moby-Dick as being funny, playful, experimental, or fun to read, but it is very much all these things. Which is not to say it doesn’t get gloomy and serious, too. (Spoiler alert: the ship sinks and almost everybody dies.) It’s a lot of things, all at once. When I picked it up off the shelf and decided it was finally time to dive in, I expected to find a dusty, dense, difficult tome that felt like work to get through. It’s definitely a commitment (it took me about two months) and you might need a hand deciphering some of the historical and literary references (this annotated online version is a great help), but if your experience is anything like mine, it will feel more like an adventure than a burden.
For the two months I spent with Moby-Dick, I was entertained, challenged, surprised, and caught up in a grand tale. I was repeatedly moved by the sheer beauty of Herman Melville’s peerless writing (the whale, “gliding at high noon through a dark blue sea leav[es] a milky-way wake of creamy foam, all spangled with golden gleamings”), and struck by the intriguing questions the book raises about fate, obsession, the limits of our knowledge, and our complex relationship to nature.
In all, reading Moby-Dick was a great reminder that every once in a while, it’s a good idea to pick up one of those classics that everybody’s heard about but that not many people actually read anymore, and see what made it a classic in the first place. What you find might surprise you.
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