Customer Reviews

Ahab's Wife Or, The Star-gazer

5 star:		(125)
4 star:		(50)
3 star:		(38)
2 star:		(28)
1 star:		(33)

 

 

I'm confused. Has the mark of good fiction now become brevity? I didn't find a single word in this glorious book wasted. If anything, I was sorry that the book ended when it did, as I would have willingly continued to follow Una's adventures. What an amazing character! Women in the nineteenth century lived fascinating lives, but since "social" history did not come into vogue until the 20th century, we are only now beginning to know about the lives of women. Novelists, drawing on the knowledge that we do have, are filling in the gaps to create fully fleshed-out characters such as Una.

If you're looking for a quick read, best look elsewhere. If you love rich language, love strong female characters, love tales of the sea, then read this book. Ms. Naslund is to be congratulated for creating a truly memorable character and for allowing such a character to experience a full banquet of life experiences.

Brava!

Author Naslund takes up the tale of the young wife Ahab mentions but briefly in Moby Dick. It takes place during and after the loss of the Pequod during its fatal hunt for the great White Whale and is the first-person memoir of Una Spenser.

This book is so literary, so well crafted for its subject that I can't believe it was written in 1999 and not in the late 1800's. Only a few anachronisms betray the modern date for Ahab's Wife. (A mention of kiwi fruit for one, they were not cultivated outside of China nor known as Kiwi until the early 1900's)

Una Spenser (named for Spenser's character in the Faerie Queene) is a courageous yet imaginative heroine. She struggles against God, against slavery, against traditional women's' roles in pre-Civil War America, runs away to sea, and meets Captain Ahab after a harrowing experience aboard ship.

The scope of this book is grand and it is written a bit in style that pays homage to Melville, grasping some of Melville's poetry and symbology of Nature and also the sexual ambiguity. But Naslund also stitches in a bit of Virginia Woolf and To The Lighthouse. Sections of Melville's work are patched in to form a smooth story of Ahab's soul mate, his female side, Una, whom he loved and abandoned for his destiny with Moby Dick.

In fact, this book reminds me of the patchwork quilts mentioned many times in Ahab's Wife. The pieces are stitched together (12 stitches to the inch, Una can sew) in colors that blend to make a pleasing whole. Yet pieces of fabric come from many diverse sources, such as the Melville classic and Woolf as well as others.

This is a brilliant achievement of a novel yet reads like a magnificent yarn. Naslund is not only a master writer but also a master storyteller. I could not put this book down until I finished every last page and I am going to re-read it immediately.

Ahab's Wife suffers from being perhaps a little too long. I had to struggle to finish the final quater of the book because it seems to lack a certain dramatic impact, especially when compared to the rest of the book. However, in general, this novel is still a fabulous read. I found it epic in scope and extremely poignant. I loved Naslund's initial premise - placing a woman with 20th century morality and "modern" fears, desires, loathings and hopes in the middle of the 19th century just as the age of industrialisation was dawning. We are witness to not only Una's incredible adventures but also her uncanny ability to rise above the social restrictions of the day and develop a wonderfully liberal, tolerant and free thinking attitude towards life. The novel reads like an ocean going sailing ship, swaying and flowing gacefully across the sea. And the cast of characters are truly eclectic: From intelligence and sexual ambiguity of Una's fellow sailors Giles and Kit to the staunchly seaman like Captain Ahab. Naslund introduces to many memorable people. Naslund also raises some delightfully "modern" issues: Cannibalism, the nature of sexuality, single parenthood, feminism and the state of the man and his psyche in a time when the individual was becoming increasingly aware of his position in the universe.

Although the length is an issue this is still a fine novel which certainly packs a wallop and it surely begs a sequel.

Michael Leonard

I finally made it through Ahab's Wife because I was determined to finish it. I, and not just Una, was on a journey. I was searching for a point. I found the first 200 pages very gripping but the rest of the book lost my interest because it was not the telling of one story but of many different story threads and themes, that unfortunately, never get sewn together into a beautiful Kentucky quilt. I'm not sorry I read it but Una telling her life story was not enough to captivate me through 600 pages of various side plots that ring hollow with moral righteousness.

The story became far too absurd and yet took itself too seriously to revel in the absurdity. It reminded me a lot of the movie Forest Gump but at least Forest Gump appeared to have some self-awareness of how ridiculous all of the coincidences and star cameos where and by that awareness made them entertaining. The smorgasbord of famous literary figures, artists, renowned abolitionists, scientists, madmen, dwarfs, slaves, suffragists, sea captains and gays drown the story with the ridiculous. The story would have been better served with fewer exoticized characters that were more developed. The most interesting characters die off or fade from the story far too early.

My sister and I used to read a lot of romance novels and joke back and forth about the various carriage accidents, sudden deaths, and tragedies that would befall the poor main characters. This book was filled with so many and such varied calamities that I felt there was a great burden put on the character Una. She was just one woman, but she was forced to represent all woman who might possibly have lived in this time period and to suffer all of their losses and rejoice in all of their successes.

The book had some great moments and some beautifully written lines but in the end I felt like it was simply too many under-realized characters and story lines that rambled on for too long. I would give the first 200 pages of the book 4 stars and the rest of the book just 2 stars. Once you read every word of Ahab's Wife you become numb to how much you enjoyed the first leg of the journey, so my final rating for the entire book is 2 stars.

Several things about this book are good. The sentence-level writing is often beautiful, and the characterization overall is strong. Una is a vivid and distinctive personality. Ahab is also surprisingly well characterized.

However, overall this is a book I hesitate to wholeheartedly recommend.

It's whale-like in its volume -- very long and *reads* very long because the proportion of philosophizing, exposition, and musings is very high compared to the amount of story. I felt there were too many themes, too many thoughts and symbols and ideas, and would have preferred fewer and better developed. The long passages of airy stuff get boring after a while.

I was disappointed that Una never really experiences a crisis or has to deal with her own actions. She does a horrible thing--which I won't spoil for new readers-- but never seems compelled to expiation. Throughout the book, Una does various things that perhaps she shouldn't do, but she never really faces the consequences. Though many bad things happen to her, she always has friends and supporters and the hard times don't last. Most unrealistic to me was the way she attracts one man after another.

I found the characters overall a bit hard to believe as nineteenth-century people: abolitionist, with mixed feelings about whaling, religiously tolerant, proto-feminist, overwhelmingly intellectual and constantly talking about literature... these beliefs did exist at the time, but I don't really see Una as coming from a background where I would expect them to be current, and when they are all combined and little dissent (with the brief exception of Una's religious father) exists, it reads like an attempt to make historical people palatable to modern-day readers. Which I'm not in favor of.

Lastly, while I applaud the success of a "fanfic" book -- one which exists as an homage to another book, using some of its characters and its world -- and feel it's a more valid literary form than it gets credit for, Ahab's Wife falls into a common fanfic trap. That's having the main character romantically involved with several characters from the original book. Ahab was a given and works fine, but there's another character Una ends up with, and that element did not work for me at all; it seems unnecessary and inappropriate somehow.

The vast amount of critical praise for this book surprises me a bit. It's an interesting effort, but I can't see it as great literature.

I read this novel with great pleasure. In this age of post-modernist spareness, it is delicious to read a big thick book with a plot and many characters. I did indeed feel that I was transported into another world, and I like it when a book can do this for me. I did, however, have some difficulty with the basic premise of the novel. Although it's years since I read Moby Dick, Ahab's mythic shadow is still present in my mind. I cannot, even suspending all disbelief, imagine him as a domestic creature in any way. Ahab as a lover is beyond my imaginative capacities. Appparently, not so for Naslund. In the end, though, I just could not be convinced that Ahab would be at all interested in a hearth (even if shared with the adventurous, sensual Una) and this hampered my full enjoyment of the novel. The same goes for Ishmael--a husband? I think not. Ishmael is a wanderer and always will be for me. While the plot of Moby Dick is nowhere near fresh in my mind, its mythic imprint remains, and though Naslund's book is very pleasurable, interesting, and yes, a great deal easier to read, I can't really see it as a companion to Melville's work. I suspect many who have not read Melville will read it and enjoy it, but on a deep, spiritual level, it doesn't seem much related to the classic. Even so, I highly recommend the book. I learned lots from it and had plenty of new images created in my mind as a result of reading it. The plot can be rather pat in places, but there are lovely scenes which are quite fantastical (the protagonist's journey through the forest with a dwarf, the idyllic life at an island lighthouse, and some wonderful descriptions of food!)--these scenes, rather than the main character and her romances will remain with me.

I let "Ahab's Wife" sit on the shelf for months after purchasing it, worried that it would turn out to be some sort of preachy feminist pastiche. I needn't have worried. Though its protagonist is no slouch as a feminist, that wasn't among its several big flaws, and for me the flaws were comfortably outweighed by its rich rewards.

Taken sentence for sentence, almost all the writing is luscious. The author's love of "Moby-Dick", and her sharp-eyed fidelity to its setting, time, and characters, is evident throughout. Only during the brief part of the novel actually taking place on the Pequod does Naslund attempt to replicate Melville's voice, or rather several of his voices, in a sequence of chapters in the form of soliloquies and playlets. That effort is as successful as it is amusing, but the remaining, non-Pequod, passages are kinder on the syntax-challenged 21st century reader than Melville was.

I loved the accurate period detail, on quilting and cooking and lightouse keeping, on blubber rendering and religious factions. I enjoyed the way the story flowed effortlessly along, but left plenty of Easter eggs for the alert reader to find. (What is the model in "Moby-Dick" for the ship Sussex? Why do the castaways throw their raincatching cups away before they are rescued? Why does Giles ask Una for her earring on the Alba Albatross?)

The first two thirds of the book has a powerful narrative drive, with vivid characters, robust suspense and dire catastrophes; powerful enough that the momentum carried me through the doldrums of the last third of the book, which meanders, and reads less like a novel than like the diary entries of some pleasant, progressive young 1840s matron with a penchant for name dropping. Naslund tries too hard to stuff the kitchen sink into those later chapters. And in the meantime we learn too little about the characters we came to care about in the first half, and Una seems too blithely unmarked by her earlier travails. For most of the book, I admired her resilience, but by the end I was wondering if past a certain point resilience doesn't become a character flaw.

For as long as the book maintains its fine first wind, Una emerges as a fit mate for Captain Ahab: as independent and blasphemous as he is (no accident, surely, that the novel contains exactly 666 pages!), but balancing his thundering "No!" to the Creator with a steadfast, sensuous "Yes" to the creatures. It's only in that sense that this novel takes a revisionist stance toward its great predecessor. Unfortunately, the flaccid last third of the book drains Una's "yes" of much of its credibility. Despite the promise of the early chapters, it fails to resonate at a mythic depth comparable to Ahab's "no."

Still, it's a good read, and no more competent, more pleasurable, or more slyly appreciative a spinoff on Ahab's story is likely to come along in the next hundred years.

The good first: A beautifully written book, almost poetic in spots. I always love to read about strong women characters, and the main character, Una, is definitely ahead of her time. I liked how the characters of 'Moby Dick' were fleshed out and given more indepth personalities.
The bad: I think that having read 'Moby Dick' and 'The Heart of the Sea' (book about the Essex) instilled a bias in me that could not be shaken as I read this book. 'Moby Dick' is so complex and wonderful to discover; a book with many interpretations. 'Ahab's Wife' doesn't leave any mystery. We are placed deeply within Una's own mind and travel her thoughts with her. I also didn't like how the author borrowed heavily from the true tale of the Essex when writing about Una's adventure on the Sussex. It was nearly verbatim to what I read in 'The Heart of the Sea'. What the Essex crew suffered was extraordinarily horrible. It bothered me that the author used the account of the Essex to sensationalize Una's life. I probably would've given this book higher marks if I hadn't read 'Moby Dick' and 'The Heart of the Sea', but I have, and so I recommend that the reader read them first before tackling this less satisfying novel.

"Don't you buy it -- don't you read it when it does come out, because it is by no means a sort of book for you," Herman Melville wrote of Moby-Dick to a female acquaintance. " What is it," Ahab had cried in his last moments of reason before his chase of the White Whale, "what is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding and jamming myself on all the time?" Melville devoted a scant 10 sentences to Ahab's wife in his chronicle of an obsessive pursuit. From this spare rib, Sena Jeter Naslund in Ahab's Wife, fashions not only a woman but an entire world and in so doing revises literature. "Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last," Una Spenser begins her story lying on her back on a Nantucket beach after Ahab's death, watching the clouds go by. One of them, she thinks, looks a bit like Ahab's face. She waves goodbye. In Una's life story, Ahab is but one player among many, and not necessarily the most important one.He was a decent person, good in bed even ... until that whale came along! In beautifully structured 19th-century-style prose, with divisions into many little Melville-ian chapters, this book is proof that the pursuit of happiness can be more rewarding than that of a whale.

I thought I was losing it as I wrestled to finish this book. Logged on to Amazon just to see what you all had to say about it. I was semi-smitten for the first 200 pages and since it's 666 (interesting number) long, I sincerely wanted it to be a great book.

Soon I started saying "what?" quite often. Finally I realized that I really didn't like Una, nor did I care very much about her. One of my favorite irritating moments is the pie-baking episode with Frannie on p. 608 when it looked like it would be a "touching" reunion until Una bolts for the beach to begin her tome on a grain of sand. What??? Shakespeare she is not!! But she makes it back for a piece of pie.

Everything reminded Una of something or someone else (Ch. 155). As someone pointed out, there were endless, poetic but often tedious ruminations of insignificant moments or scenes, while important events and happenings were glossed over and/or left incomplete. What??? Did you love her comments on Robben and the Judge's homosexual relationship? And, the needle, what's the significance of the needle as it too crops up in several strange and inappropriate places?

I am disappointed. I'm wary when an author takes a snippet from a masterpiece and decides to do a spin-off. In my opinion, this book was too much, too many, too long! It had potential, it fell far short. Blame the author, blame the editor, whomever, we deserved better. I just wish my book club had selected Melville's original. Perhaps that's the answer....back to the classics!!