Moby-Dick (Dover Thrift Editions)
by Herman Melville
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Book Summary Information
Author: Herman MelvilleBrand: Dover Publications
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-08-29
ISBN: 0486432157
Number of pages: 464
Publisher: Dover Publications
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780486432151
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of Moby-Dick (Dover Thrift Editions)
Book Review: The frustration, the grandeur
Summary: 5 Stars
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 it 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, Moby Dick 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 an attempt 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 accidentally swallowed a whaling version of Wikipedia? 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 globe.
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.)
Summary of Moby-Dick (Dover Thrift Editions)
A masterpiece of storytelling and symbolic realism, this thrilling adventure and epic saga pits Ahab, a brooding sea captain, against the great white whale that crippled him. More than just the tale of a hair-raising voyage, Melville's riveting story passionately probes man's soul. A literary classic first published in 1851, Moby-Dick represents the ultimate human struggle.
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