Customer Reviews

Moby-Dick (Dover Thrift Editions)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.)

Simply put, it takes good general knowledge/education to appreciate all the symbolism, imagery, and metaphor in this book (and even then you still will probably miss something that's been written). I won't get into all that because it's been beaten to death elsewhere. The other thing to remember is that Herman Melville himself served aboard a whaler. Maybe that's why he found it necessary to write about every last detail about life aboard a 19th century whaler. Otherwise yes, if you just are hungry for the story you probably could get away with reading the first and last hundred pages. That being said I found this a very enjoyable read. The chapters like some other reviews have mentioned are for the most part brief and go fast. And I think you will enjoy even the rather dry parts if you are a history buff like myself. Maybe like myself this book should be read at a distance from your formal education, that way your life experience/knowledge I feel will help in its enjoyment and interpretation, and you can come to your own conclusions about how much is really going on here, without the fear of getting a bad grade!

There are a lot of fascinating things in this book: reflections on the nature of civilization, religion, obsession. A lot of it is surprisingly nuanced for a mid nineteenth century account, and delivers a story with a lot more ambiguity than I was expected. Unfrotunately, none of those are the central focus of the book, the essence of the authorial intent. That main intent is focused on providing an array of facts on whales and whaling. This element really grinds down the conventional story, both in the sheer length given the minutia of detail and the stalling of momentum the back and forth goes.

It's interesting to read this work in the light of hard science fiction, which similarly often carries huge amounts of exposition and background setting. I'm not sure if I can hold this piece as objectively more flawed because it's talking about details I'm not interested in, but at the end of the day I'm not terribly interested in whales, and feel the author went too far into his own specific interests in representation. That gives the book a strange kind of meta element to the Ahab obsession for which it is best known.

Still, I can't dismiss it entirely, and am at a level curious to see how similar Melville's other stuff is. I can believe from the strength of concept in visualizing many of the characters and the dramatic build that there's a great novel in him, but in the end this text is too padded, slow and disjointed to be a success.

If the question above is also your motivation for reading this book, you have to be a masochist to actually finish it!

Moby-Dick (aka "The Whale") is a short story, interjected into a 19th century encyclopedia on whales. The famous plot composes only about 20% of the actual book. "The Whale" is the more appropriate title.

Melville intersperses the plot among various non-fiction descriptions of whaling. The story is dribbled out and you are forced to slog through laborious descriptions of whaling, after each chapter that advances the plot. The pacing is tedious.

Arguably, this book is considered a classic, not because of the story of Captain Ahab or even the painstaking descriptions of whaling, but because of Melville's curious use of allegory. Many of his sentences are like a poem waiting to be deciphered. He creates a picture in your mind that far exceeds any single adjective. There is a rare brilliance here. Unfortunately, much of this is lost, due to long forgotten 19th century references.

What is enjoyable about this book is seeing the world of whaling through the eyes of someone over 150 years ago. Cannibal crew members, years spent at sea, sharks eating captured whales, the dangers of carving up a 20 ton animal, the boats and ropes they use to capture whales and Melville's prophetic view on the extinction of whaling.

What sucks about this book are the asinine details and depth that Melville feels he needs to spend on a single topic. Chapters are devoted to metalworking, carpentry and stories the crew hears from other ships that are totally irrelevant to the plot. One chapter is devoted to measurements of whale skeletons, which a quick trip to Wikipedia for the modern reader would easily be more useful, accurate and interesting! As far as tedious reads go, the only thing worse would have to be Tolkien's "The Silmarillion"

Overall, I read this book to find out why it was a classic and view the tale of the crazed Captain Ahab. The captain was less crazy than I imagined and I am still not sure why this book is considered a classic, other than to torture students.

Book is durable, print is just the right size. What can I say about the material. One of the greatest books written of all time and one of my favorites.

I had always been hesitant to begin reading this book, knowing about its celebrated history and crucial place in American literature. Now having read it, I can't imagine why I was ever hesitant. This book ROCKS!!!!! In nearly every page Melville imbues his work with a sense of lyricism and even chivalry. His description of the Pequod's officers likening them to heroic knights of the Medieval period took my breath away. And while the scientific chapters on whales and whaling were boring, I did find myself being enraptured not by the information, but by the expectation of meeting the famous White Whale himself. By the time Ahab was in site of his quarry, I was obsessed with the Whale too. Too me, this was a near-perfect book, and worthy of the epithet "epic.". I would say that you shouldn't pick this book up until you've reached adulthood and had experience reading classic works of this caliber. Otherwise, you won't be able to appreciate it as much as I did.

this book has been one of my most loved books since I was a small child. it's just great and though most people wouldn't think to read the book to a child. My father read it to me and so i have read it to mine and we have all enjoyed this amazing book at bedtime.

"Moby Dick" is such a tough climb that you can miss a lot of the scenery on the way up.

Like Mount Everest, with "Moby Dick" there's no denying the presence of greatness, but wrapping yourself around it is another question.

It is a symptom of how low the reading public has fallen in highwayscribery's estimation that the famed novel's solid reputation comes as something of a surprise.

Are people still reading this book?

Herman Melville's prose is dense and rich and hard work to absorb. That said, it would not be going out on a limb, given the classic's status, to say the effort is worth the while.

Hung from the author's whale tale are many meditations on the human (and animal!) condition and his prolific output and textured life inform them beautifully.

"Moby Dick" has so much to give, but one must wonder whether Melville could even find a publisher in today's environment.

Last year, this scribe entered his latest effort, "The Sidewalk Smokers Club," into the "Writer's Digest" book contest. That particular competition and publication seem rooted in the academic wing of today's American literary universe, their contents and judgments fueled by so many masters and mistresses of fine arts.

In any case, the book "scored" well without passing to the next round. The judge had problems with the "loss of momentum" that took place when the highway scribe's alter ego, Stephen Siciliano, intermittently and briefly, digressed from his yarn and extrapolated certain goings-on in the story to the larger universe surrounding.

That judge never read "Moby Dick."

In the epic, Melville's actual "story" might be told using one-fifth the pages he actually presses from his fevered mind: The narrator gets on a whaling boat for cash and adventure, but is unwittingly enlisted in Captain Ahab's mad quest to end the life of Moby Dick and avenge the white beast's severing of his leg.

Along the way, however, the reader is treated to voluminous information about the cetaceous species, "Cetaceous," being an expression the scribe did not know until attacking this tome.

Right whale, humpback whale, gray whale, and sperm whale - the particular star of "Moby Dick" -- all get their due. And not a perspective rendered from some distant boat deck mind you, but from the inside out, from mouth to blow-hole, to the tippy-tippy "fluke" (more cetaceous vocabulary).

And this is good, for books should inform us of things we thought we knew more about, especially in the case of the whale, which is Melville's point, as it is the largest living animal and a subject of remarkable strength, grace, and symbolism.

But such discourse, however edifying, does serve to break-up the narrative -- a lot.

And those who haven't worked much on a 19th Century commercial sailing vessel will find the preponderance of nautical terms daunting.

Spar, gunwhale, leeward, and aft, chocks, mizzen Donner and Blitzen, it's all rather hard to keep track of so that the uninitiated is tempted to "read through" the detailed renderings of seafaring equipment in an effort to get on with the story.

And that's a lot of skimming.

If our democracy grants everybody an opinion and permits an unknown writer to pass judgment upon a national treasure, highwayscribery would venture that "Moby Dick" is better in many of its parts than it is as a whole and integrated artistic work.

There...we said it.

Melville is muscular and poetic, scientific and rigorous, cultured and biblical in his writerly search for life's truths through the prism of an ocean adventure.

In highwayscribery's favorite passage, the monomaniacal Ahab talks with the severed head of a whale his crew hunted a day earlier:

"Speak, thou vast and venerable head," muttered Ahab, "which though ungarnished with beard, yet here and there look hoary with mosses, speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid the world's foundation. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou has been where bell or diver never went; has slept by many a sailor's side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Thou saw'st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sunk beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them..."

It is one of several stunning meditations on the sea's mysteries. Also a reminder of how much knowledge both above and below the ocean's surface is beyond man's reach, and of the ever-present perils that dearth of information poses.

Melville's Pequod, boat and motley crew alike, are a dark vision, something out of Burning Man, a world beat symphony 100 years before Bob Marley that accrues flavors as it traverses the earth's diverse quadrants, dark and desperate, aboriginal and Quaker, murderous and hungry and vulnerable, too.

Like many of the big books Moby requires not so much a second reading as a scholarly commitment to its multi-layered method and madness, a love affair, a small piece of your life, for in crafting it, Melville clearly gave a piece of his own.

A must have for the classic reader - not for those who cannot appreciate the writings of old - you'll be bored.

First the bad: The author goes off on tangents that seem to have little or nothing to do with the rest of the book. If he reduced the volume of text by 20% this might be the best book ever written!

Now the good: Moby Dick is fascinating, riveting, entertaining, amusing, imaginative and very educational (at least when it comes to 19th century whaling - and life aboard a whale boat). Melville brings the characters alive and gives them depth as unique, vibrant individuals, each with a fascinating story of his own. You feel that you know the crew as real sailors rather than fictional characters - and near the end, it hurts to know that they're sailing aboard a doomed ship. . .

After reading this book I'm inspired to seek employment on a Japanese whale boat, just to personally "know what whaling is." (For all you whale lovers, I'm kidding about going out on the whale boat.)