Melville's modernist tour of America's stream of humanity
925747
"The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade" is, as its title would suggest, a satirical farce. In spite of its wit and the occasional laugh, however, it is the hardest of all Melville's works to follow, in no small part because its lead character keeps changing his identity--and that is assuming, by the way, that there's just one lead character to begin with. If at times the novel feels like a patchwork, it's because it is: Melville merged a number of stories and travel pieces originally intended for magazine publication into a continuous, claustrophobic cyclorama.

Set on the Mississippi River on April Fool's Day, "The Confidence-Man" follows the interrelated episodes and adventures of a stream of passengers who board and disembark a steamboat. Many of the confidence men (and their prophetic counterparts) may be the same person in various disguises. (Melville's deliberate obfuscation on this point has launched a hundred academic papers.)

The various scoundrels, shills, suckers, and shape-shifters are a parade of American types: "men of business and men of pleasure; parlor men and backwoodsmen; farm-hunters and fame-hunters; heiress-hunters, gold-hunters, buffalo-hunters, bee-hunters, happiness-hunters, truth-hunters, and still keener hunters after all these hunters." Everyone on board is trying to sell something or to swindle someone or to raise money for a charity or to find a job or to convince a fellow passenger of his own integrity. A persistent theme is the typically American monomaniacal pursuit of money.

"I am neither prophet nor charlatan," says a peddler of medicine to a sick man. "But again I say, you must have confidence." Yet only a fool would have confidence, and this insecurity leads to an irrational paranoia. Nobody can trust anyone: "it is one of the imbecilities of the suspicious person to fancy that every stranger, however absent-minded, he sees so much as smiling or gesturing to himself in any odd sort of way, is secretly making him his butt."

For obvious reasons, "The Confidence-Man" is considered the precursor of the modernist novel. As an academic exercise, it's both intriguing and (to use a technical term) "mind-blowing." And there is certainly a steady stream of quotable aphorisms and clever anecdotes. Yet I also found the novel to be frustrating: somewhat like entering a labyrinth from which there is no hope of escape or solution--and at the end of the book you're still stuck in the maze. The farce is a lot of fun initially but it becomes a bit maddening and repetitive after reaching one too many of the novel's narrative dead ends.

As one of Melville's contemporary reviewers noted, the novel makes as much sense if the chapters are read in reverse order, and the "characters" are distinguishable not by their personalities as much as they are defined by their wholly predictable actions and reactions. Halfway down the Old Muddy, after meeting the Melville's umpteenth American stereotype, I realized that the novel had no Bartleby or Nippers, nor, for that matter, would readers be introduced to a K. or an Olga. Instead, "The Confidence-Man" is like Kafka without characters.
4574737
America, "the greatest poem," according to Walt Whitman, consistently outpaces the speculative. These days--in the wake of Ferguson and the Eric Garner case, in the wake of the CIA torture report, in a post-Snowden era, twitchy with drones--a word like "dystopia" has lost some of its semantic purchase.
Indeed, the America of Terence Hawkins's brilliant and incisive second novel, "American Neolithic," with its Homeland Cops and Amended First Amendment (an unlimited limiting of civil liberties), does not seem particularly distant from our own.
The story flits back and forth between Raleigh, a middle-aged Manhattan lawyer, and Blingbling, a Neanderthal, who stands accused of murder. As Raleigh struggles to save his client, a history of Blingbling's ancestry emerges.
One of the great pleasures of Hawkins's novel resides in these alternating voices. The Raleigh chapters are chatty and antic, full of witty apercus ("[t]hey had gone so far as to sand the marble staircases so that the steps bowed in the middle, as though worn down by centuries of scholarly tread," Raleigh says of Yale's neo-Gothic upkeep). With Raleigh, Hawkins hits an acerbic register reminiscent, in its deprecation, insight, and angst, of Sam Lipsyte: "the air was pretty cool despite China's new one-child-two-cars-per-family policy"; "I'm one year short of twice [her] age," Raleigh remarks of his Iranian girlfriend who is required to register herself as a citizen "Of Combatant Ancestry." Hawkins, it should be noted, is equally adept with dialogue, capturing the mordant sitcom-speak of lawyers and Big Brother patois of "Homeland golems" with subtle ease.
The Blingbling sections, set in an undisclosed location, two years after the legal proceedings, form the heart of the novel. Written in a more elevated tone (I was reminded of Kafka's "A Report to an Academy" and George Saunders's canine epistle, "Woof: A Plea of Sorts"), Blingbling's narrative, though undeniably grave in its import, is frequently very funny: "I often pressed my father about the Nest's migrations," Blingbling remarks. "But he was not a very good historian. In fact, I am not at all sure that he was my father."
For all its comedy, however, the America that emerges in Hawkins's novel is deeply unsettling, an all too conceivable police state glutted on fear. I do not mean to suggest that the novel is in anyway nihilistic, of course. Far from it. Terence Hawkins has written a sharp, morally propulsive antidote for our times.
1601845
Ostensibly,  THE WILDERNESS OF RUIN is about  Jesse Pomeroy who tortured and murdered several children beginning in 1871 when he was only twelve, but the book also addresses whether great American author, Herman Melville, also might have been insane due to the stress he put himself under monetarily and intellectually while writing such literary works as MOBY DICK and PIERRE.

At first Jesse Pomeroy was guilty of sadistic assaults against very young children. He was readily captured and sent to reform school, but his mother fought for his release, claiming she needed him to help run a small grocery and to help his older brother who ran a news stand and delivered newspapers. A charitable organization helped get him out early, and the family moved to South Boston from Chelsea where he wouldn't be so well known. Shortly after he was freed, two children were murdered, and of course, Jesse was the principal suspect. Ten-year old Katie Curran wasn't found for months, although she was buried in the basement of his mother's grocery, which had been searched several times.

The reason Pomeroy is significant is that he was eventually found guilty and held in solitary confinement for over forty years. Jesse was quite adept at trying to escape. Once he drilled through the bars, made it into the passageway and might have escaped had it not been for a guard's cat who drew attention to him.

Melville did well as an author as long as his ambitions were in the popular vein. As a young man, Melville served on a whaling vessel; he wrote several novels such as OMOO and WHITE JACKET about his experiences  Once he was introduced to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Melville aspired to more literary ambitions, culminating in MOBY DICK. Melville was also inspired by the Essex tragedy where a whaler was attacked by a whale, and he used books on that incident as research. Melville was also interested in insanity and read everything he could find on the affliction. Captain Ahab is symbolic of that fascination. The public hated MOBY DICK, especially the long encyclopedic information on whales. This led to money problems and Melville was forced to take a job working at the Custom Office for a miniscule salary. It's surprising that author Roseanne Montillo never mentions Bartleby the Scrivener, one of our greatest short stories, which was obviously influence by Melville's job.

It's surprising how similar issues surrounding mental illness and what to do with young offenders were in 1871 and 2015. Today, perhaps Jesse would have been declared an adult and tried for first degree murder.  Pomeroy who taught himself the law while in solitary always argued he should have been given an insanity defense. What is really surprising is how many organizations and individuals fought to get either a pardon or a release for Jesse into the general population at the prison. I would imagine his record of over forty years in solitary confinement still stands.
4237646
"Moby Dick" is considered to be one of America's classic books. Herman Melville based his story on the sinking of The Essex. He did however, not ever visit Nantucket or meet Captain Pollard of that doomed vessel until after he published his book. I quote a review of Melville's own life. "Despite the authors hopes, his book sold but a few thousand copies in his lifetime, and Melville, after a few more failed attempts at novels, settled into a reclusive life and spent 19 years as a customs inspector in New York City. He drank and suffered the death of his two sons. Depressed, he abandoned novels for poetry."

This book is extremely hard for me to give a star rating. It is hard to classify. It is tragedy and comedy, a stage play and a prose poem. There is very much said about the mechanisms of whale fishery, the anatomy and behavior of the Sperm Whale, and about whale fisherman, whaling vessels and the whale fishing industry in general. What lost me was the fact the author made the story drag out, ascribing great deep meaning and even greater intensity to everything and anything. It was too much for me to read silently in print form, so on page 100/448, I threw in the towel and opted to continue on in audiobook format. Now, I was able to continue on, for having someone read this often poetic book to with feeling, made the experience quite another thing.
Moby Dick is about the fictional Captain Ahab, who lost his leg at the knee to an albino Sperm Whale, named "Moby Dick." Ahab returned home to Nantucket to convalesce, brooding and plotting his revenge. Standing on a fake leg carved from the jaw of a Sperm Whale, he captains the ship, The Pequod, and means to return to have his vengeance. The story is narrated and book begun with the famous line, Call me Ishmael, who becomes to sole survivor of Ahabs fated voyage. It is a story on how hate and unforgiveness can lead to our ruin, if we let it consume us. The book is so hugely composed of strong poetic feeling, that if you are a lover of poetry, this may be your book. However, Moby Dick has something for everyone. It is an action tale, well researched and written. However, for those of us that like action tales without so much poetic through, the book will probably just drag you down. My first thought after 100 pages was, This mans editor should have gotten him to cut this books volume by twenty percent at least. The audiobook was better, and I believe that I may like the latest miniseries starring Patrick Stewart even better, which I plan to view soon.

So, in conclusion, I give the written word 3/5 stars, the audiobook 4/5 stars
2396730
Quite apart from, some might say in spite of Moby Dick's label as "a classic," it has become one of my favorite novels. It breathes with a life that the rest of Melville's work (with the possible exceptions of "Bartelby" and the "Lightening Rod Salesman") lacks.
The reason I'm writing a review of the book (my voice has little to add to what others have already written about the text) is to encourage readers to pick up the modern library version. The illustrations add so much texture to the story. They are not imagination robbing images, their semi-surreality expands rather than narrows mental freedom. Get it. You won't be disappointed.
3427991
I just re-read Lord of the Flies. Like all Americans, I read this book first in High School. Re-reading it twenty five years later was enlightening. And reading it after I myself have authored four novels (and am halfway through my fifth), approaching Goldings work not as an anxious adolescent but as tradesman attempting to improve his own craft was a singularly transcendent experience. But Ill get to that below.

First the guts. Lord of the Flies is of course a classic. It is an archetypal book  a treatise on humanity through the story of a group of British children marooned on a jungle island (presumably in the South Pacific) after the airplane that was evacuating them from a nuclear attack on the British Isles went down. British, I suppose, because that culture is known as the apex of civilization and therefore makes excellent fodder for a dissertation on madness. Granted, Golding was also British so he knew his subject well. Lord of the Flies is the story about how easy it is for us all to lose our civilization, to return to the barbarity that we all have just under the surface of our mores and traditions and laws.

The novel is a study in opposites  archetypes, as I mentioned before. Jack embodies madness, tribalism, and violence. Watching his rapid descent from choir leader to murdering tribal chief is instructive. Ralph is civilization, unable to impose itself when men minds abandon it. Piggy is reason, naked and empty before the violence  vulnerable. The conch is tradition, fragile yet holding a place in peoples imaginations, until it doesnt anymore and is shattered. The beastie is fear and madness, necessary for the manufacture of tyranny; the fire is hope and purpose and responsibility. None of this is new  any High School literature class discusses them as part of our process of understanding ourselves. I like archetypal books; I even used archetypes in my own first novel The Lieutenant of San Porfirio. So why did this second reading of The Flies impact me so?

Somewhere over the darkened curve of the world the sun and moon were pulling; and the film of water on the earth planet was held, bulging slightly on one side while the solid core turned. The great wave of the tide moved further along the island and the water lifted. Softly, surrounded by a fringe of inquisitive bright creatures, itself a silver shape beneath the steadfast constellations, Simons dead body moved out towards the open sea. Lord of the Flies

We novelists have a secret, well a two-part secret really. The first part is that we disparage our own work. We are told not to even re-read our novels after they are published, lest we collapse in despair and attempt to cleanse their imperfections in flames. But the second part of that secret is that we actually consider ourselves better than others. Many a time I have sat reading books considered classics, books like Fahrenheit 451 or Housekeeping or anything by Camus and thought to myself Why is this a classic? My stuff is better. Even good books like Lord Jim do not give me a sense of too great an inferiority. I know, were not supposed to say that  hence the secret. So heres goes for Golding; as I read him, I felt like Wyatt Earp as he is about to face Johnny Ringo, I didn't really have time to think about it, he says to Doc Holiday. But Ive had plenty of time to think about this. I cant beat him, can I? to which Doc Holiday responds No.

There it is, William Goldings prose, his command of the beats and the crescendo of his story is so masterful that he made me want to put down my pen and pick up a crayon. Alas, I said it  read this book; if you are also a novelist read it with awe and surrender knowing, like I know We cant beat him.
4591757
Until I read TS Eliot's critique of Huckleberry Finn, I didn't understand the book.  The point that Tom Sawyer is the actor/director and Huck the audience, wallflower, altruist--is a simple fact I simply overlooked.
Eliot's reading of the book's final line makes a thoroughly entertaining read deeply melancholy.  And if what Hemmingway says about Twain is true, namely, that Huck Finn appears in one way or another in every work of American Literature thereafter, it sheds light on the melancholy and loneliness that is American literature in the modern age.
418613
Moby Dick is the quintessential American novel.  Hard not to respect Melville for his attention to detail, language, and manners. These can often be overlooked as we immerse ourselves in the symbolism and the chase of the White Whale.  As a Cape Codder, I have to say that each and every time I read Moby Dick I feel closer to our roots in the sea.
1384777
Great canon of classic American Literature. Cain provides great context for the literature presented, and includes many unique and influential texts from American history. Cain includes a wonderful selection of Melville short stories, some of which are hard to come across. The text includes writings from authors such as Emerson, Thoreau, Ben Franklin, Margaret Fuller, Hawthorne, Melville, Bartolome De la Casas, Frederick Douglass, Harriot Jacobs, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Christopher Colombus, and many more.

I found this volume to be very informative and interesting. I think the footnotes were helpful and appreciate Cain's objectivity and brevity. I read this for college and was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. I  believe the texts included in this volume should be read by all Americans and anyone else interested in the literature produced in American History. The texts portray a rich American culture, giving the reader a deep understanding of American history, starting with the American revolution through the Civil War and Transcedentalism. Read writings from Women and African Americans before there were equal rights, or from European explorers and priests about the settlization of America. This text also provides an abundance of literature from classic writers, such as the Scarlet Letter.
2657881
This book is what I use in my Melville unit in High School.  I highly recommend it to the novice to Melville's work.

"Bartleby the Scrivener" brings out the important irony of American life, that most people do not want you to tell the truth.  When asked why he didn't do the work assigned, Bartleby answered truthfully and it kills him.  How often does that happen in American life?

"Benito Cereno" shows the duplicity of the American Slave trade.  And it shows that the ethics of the slave trade also depend on a lie.

"Billy Budd" shows that the first casualty in war time is the truth.  And this dealing with liars and the truth and the immutable truth that the law without judgment is itself unjust.

Get this collection for your library.
3696400
This book is an unflinching examination of human nature and American culture.  Wallace works on so many levels simultaneously that one could probably read this novel a thousand times and still make new discoveries.  Reading it has been an amazing experience.  Thank you Dave Wallace.
4204205
Why indeed? How about because its the best piece of literature written by an American? The Great Gatsby and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn might claim the title (from me anyway), but Moby-Dick stands out. This novel, which started out as just another novel about a sea-faring voyage, morphed into something much more: a meditation on the great world.

Nathaniel Philbrick, author of the award winning In the Heart of the Sea about the whaling ship Essex tragedy that affected Melvilles work, writes a brief and perceptive appreciation of this great book. Philbricks book works well because his brief chapters reference scenes and characters from Moby-Dick that serve as a gateway to a deeper understanding of Melville, its time (America headed unknowingly into the crucible of the Civil War), and its characters. Each character plays a role in the drama of a ships crew, the great oceans, and the Universe. Philbrick reminds us that Melville has packed so much into this book some think is  "about a whale". Moby-Dick, for all its profundity, is in parts quite humorous, informational, didactic, and deeply insightful about human relations and our relation to world. Philbricks book reminds us of this. If, like me, youve only listened to it once (Ive never read it), Philbricks book reminds you of why you can read it again (and again) with great profit and growing appreciation.

If you're wondering about why people make such a fuss about Moby-Dick, or if you read it as a youth and found it a bore, then pick-up Philbricks book and read it to gain insights into Melville and his great book and to motivate you to go read Melvilles masterpiece.

Postscript: Ive listened to two of the (what I consider) three of the greatest American novels. (I also listened to Gatsby. I read Huck Finn in high school.) While I intend to go back and read Moby-Dick and The Great Gatsby, I value and recommend the listening experience. The performance (more than just a reading) of Moby-Dick by Frank Muller is outstanding. It got me into a book that I had started a couple of times but that I'd become bogged down in. Now I know where Im going. For a fine appreciation of audio books, enjoy this NYT piece by Stanford anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann. By the way, I, too, have memories of passages from books that I heard associated with places. My favorite venue for listening was driving my car (not so much lately), but planes and trains work. Walking serves as a fine occasion for listening, too.
413529
BRAVE COMPANIONS is a leisurely stroll through the life and times of America. Put on your jacket, turn up the collar, grab your favorite walking-stick and set out for a fascinating walk with America's storyteller, David McCullough.

Washington, Agassiz, Remington, Harriet Beecher Stowe. Some larger-than-life, others obscured through time's dim glass. The Panama Canal, South Dakota Badlands, the rural mid-west. West Virginian coal mines. Places famous and forgotten.

McCullough has an eye for the dramatic and grand. Remington and Roosevelt, thundering across the range, trying to explore the western frontier before it becomes civilized and tame. The building of the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City, the engineering marvel of its day, contrasted with another engineering marvel, the Panama canal which cost of hundreds of lives in the muck and mire of jungles and mud.

He also has an eye for wonder in the small, tiny details of creation; the delicate, exacting drawings of Audubon and Agassiz, the flea collections of Ms. Rothschild, the painfully detailed drawings of a long-forgotten architect or the private musings and ruminations of a Commander-in-Chief who longed for heart and home.

"We live in the present, it's all we have." And no one captures other peoples' present, quite like David McCullough.
4568624
I hope that I can convince folks who intend to read Moby Dick to purchase this Norton Critical Edition. I found this edition absolutely necessary (critical? LOL) to my understanding of the novel.  Its footnotes explain words,references and the historical setting. If I'd just picked up an un-annotated version I can assure you that I wouldn't have understood many of the words, usages, and contexts.
The book itself is a marvel. I didn't read it in a hurry.  Did you know that Melville's writing career was deeply damaged by the Evangelical Newspapers that existed then?.  Did you know that Ishmael and Queegqueeg "got married" and slept in the same bed for a time?  Pretty advanced for the mid-nineteenth century.  No wonder the Evangelicals despised him!  Of course, they really started attacking him much earlier, for the novels he'd written set in the South Seas.
The reality is that Herman Melville wrote the Great American Novel in his middle age and spent the rest of his life trying to support his family as a mid-level bureaucrat.
An amazing book, most strongly recommended.
651934
Melville presents a tantalizing tale of a slave rebellion aboard ship, at the turn of the 19th century. He was apparently way ahead of Styron's "Nat Turner" in his presentation of the anger of the slaves, and their violent response to their horrendous predicament. They were hardly the ignorant dummies they were perceived as back then, by their white masters.
1201251
This volume contains all the lectures and essays of the great transcendentalist writer/philosopher/poet Ralph Waldo Emerson.  And what volume it is.  Nearly all the New England poets and writers of the 19th Century were influenced heavily by this man.  His fluidity of prose, and the heavy ideas expressed give one an understanding of the American ideal.  What we are as a nation culturally really stems mostly from the thoughts and compositions of this master.

His writings on nature is authoritative of the romantic ideal, yet it reads like poetry.  His writings are little drops of gold that enrich as you go.  What sets Emerson apart in my estimation is that the aphorisms are built into the writing itself.  You get the little bits and pieces of wisdom as you go.  Which is great for all modern readers.  If you don't have time to read a long essay all at once, you can break it up, and still get lasting value for your time.

All who want to understand Americanism need to read Emerson.  Special kudos to Library of America for keeping works like this in print for all to read.
3367256
Hershel Parker has given Melville scholars and enthusiasts a valuable gift -- a scholarly examination of a life embedded in a rich context of significant relationships. Parker's presentation of evidence is all we can hope for -- a carefully balanced narrative based on primary sources where the reader benefits from a scholar's lifetime of careful research and thoughtful consideration. Drawing from an astounding wealth of primary sources, Parker walks us through Melville's life with a chronological continuity that scarcely misses a month of activity in a forty year period, articulating in rich detail Melville's interactions with people, places, and publications.
Through a careful accounting of time and travels, many puzzles are brought into clearer light. Volume Two begins with the puzzle of The Whale's reception -- Melville may never have learned of the broad praise for The Whale in England, despite the disconcerting omission of the book's final chapter by the publisher. Next, the puzzle of Pierre's career as a Young Author -- prompted by Evert Duykinck's evident betrayal as much as a devaluation of his earning potential by the Harpers, Melville interpolated a satirical diabtribe into the innovative psychological romance, Pierre. We discover lost works -- Melville developed at least three major works that were never published: Isle of the Cross (rejected), the Tortoise Hunters (incomplete or discarded), and a volume of poems in 1860 (rejected). We find what happened between his last magazine publication and the start of the Civil War: we are given a clear picture of Melville's three winters on the lecture circuit, during which he began a dedicated effort to convert from prose to poetry. Finally, we discover Melville the poet -- while holding down a low-paid job to support his family, Melville stoically endures a long period of discouraging personal setbacks during which he improves his mastery of metrical form through dedicated study and artful discernment. His creative mind is constantly at work, although his energies are strained by competing demands on his attention. With Clarel, Melville demonstrates a masterful control of theme, form, and allusion, and with John Marr and Timoleon, we meet a poet who innovated constantly, re-working and improving his stylistic experiments over many years.
Melville's mid-life challenges are of the sort that most humans face, complicated by an uncertain career, the death of two sons, and an awkward estrangement from his wife (temporary) and daughters (permanent?). He outlives most of his close relatives and friends, people he loved and who loved him, and on whom he relied for decades. Melville's natural tendency toward a self-contained privacy leads him toward a stoical reclusiveness, although he remains actively engaged with the world throughout his restless wanderings, both physical and philosophical. The biography concludes on an upward note; late in life, Melville learns by degrees of a dedicated following in England, while some of his best work is still in manuscript form, waiting to be printed some thirty years after his death.
The great pleasure of reading Parker is the way he interpolates explanations as an aid to the reader's assessment, scrupulously avoiding any forced conclusions based on ambiguous evidence. With Parker, the author is in control of the presentation, but we are allowed to apply our own critical thought toward the evidence. No conclusions are forced on us, and we encounter few intrusions by the biographer. To my mind, this is an ideal biography.