The American Bible | Moby-Dick or, The Whale (Penguin Classics)

Surprising | Moby-Dick or, The Whale (Penguin Classics) | Herman Melville

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	• Moby-Dick or, The Whale (Penguin Classics) Herman Melville Penguin Classics, 2002 - 720 pages average customer review:based on 326 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

"Dick" is a "bitch"...

Moby Dick is not a fun book to read. The prose is old-fashioned, and that is partly what vitiates the pleasure (cf. Ivanhoe). Primarily, however, it is boring, plain and simple. There are endless digressions, and asides, and plot-sabbaticals. Very easy to put down. Undoubtedly an amazing intellectual feat to pull off (hence my five stars), but still...I'd estimate that 1% of high-schoolers assigned this book end up actually reading it. Can't blame them, either. To be fair, the last twenty pages, when Ahab and Starbuck have their final tete-a-tete, and Ahab famously snarls to his finned nemesis "From Hell's heart, I stab at thee!" do cause a frisson. And I don't regret reading the book...it's a great laurel to rest on, but I will never pick it up again. Eh, give 'er a go...if you finish it, you'll know that you're a man, not a boy.

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The American Bible

-- by that I mean, our 'book of books.' I first read this in college: assigned reading for a course. For once a chore turned into a joy from the first page to the last. I was already an avid reader of plays from Aeschylus to Pinter (and especially O'Neill), and I had read the four Thomas Wolfe novels in high school, so length was not an issue. But how strange and wonderful to plunge into a book that seemed to be novel, epic, tragic poem, divine comedy, and moral philosphy all in one.

Melville was a century before his time. I am surprised that Hawthorne wasn't able to do more for him. I wonder if Linclon ever read it; I have not found any evidence that he had, since he was fond of quoting favorite passages of what he had read. I have read this great book three times over the past 40 years, and I still have and treasure the Modern Library Giant with the Grant Wood drawings that now seem so much a part of this greatest fishing story ever told. When all is said and done, it is a story about the one that got away.

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Surprising

From its 'Great American Novel' rep I expected Moby Dick to be stodgy and slow: I was thinking 700 pages of Henry James (ugh). But Melville's book is anything but stodgy. Insane, maybe--passionate, surely--original? Well, very similar in style to Scots Enlightenment, let's say Carlyle's romantic musings plus Stevenson's adventure plus a working-class ethic. But, yes, American. And damned original.

Passages in this book are written as a play. Passages are written as a history of whaling. All the characters have the same ecstatic inner monologue, and this is only intermittently broken by Melville writing directly to you without the subtext of a plot. The book is constructed in a way that makes Faulker look tame: it sprawls. No wonder it didn't make a dime when it was first published--if it were published the month after Ulysses, it'd still raise eyebrows.

This book isn't stodgy. This book is revolutionary. This book is very, very strange.

For those kids having to write book reports on Moby Dick--give up. Read Jack London's Sea Wolf. Come back after you've tangled with the Leviathan.

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The greatest Book

A critic of Melville likened him to a potter;but where as other writers shaped and formed their works into something aesthetically beautiful,Melville just tended to lump more and more clay on,turning out work that was so striking it lasts in the mind for an eternity.
'Moby Dick' is the one story Shakespeare and the Bible missed out on;an extraordinary journey into the history of Whaling,and how obsession leads to distruction.
It is indeed a book that lives with you forever and has shaped the modern novel.It also makes you feel contempt for such literary luminaries as William Golding,who attempted to capture Melvilles themes in 'The Spire' and came nowhere near!
Even those I know who struggled to read this always list 'Moby Dick'in their top 5 book list. It really is a masterpiece in every sense of the word.

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