A review by ielerol
Moby-Dick: Or, the Whale by Herman Melville
adventurous
challenging
funny
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
4.0
I had long ago given up on Moby Dick as Not For Me. I tend to enjoy economy in storytelling, and this is not an economical story in any sense. The sentences are long, twisting, and full of obscure vocabulary. There are whole chapters of (dubiously true) whale facts and detailed accounts of the practices of whaling. Even in the middle of the narrative chapters that move the plot forward, Ishmael stops to explain more whale and whaling facts.
Everyone knows the first line of Moby Dick is "Call me Ishmael", but actually the beginning of this book is a compilation of the words for whale across many languages and an extensive list of quotations about whales from literature and folk songs, and it is absolutely a harbinger of things to come.
And yet, I heard from some people whose opinions I respect that Moby-Dick is a lot of fun to read out loud, and that it's especially good to listen to as an audiobook. So, I decided it try it as an audiobook. And it turns out I maybe love Moby-Dick? Everything that bothered me about trying to read it on paper turns out to be a delight to listen to. The long, twisty sentences have a beautiful rhythm that is clearly not a naturalistic depiction of ordinary speech and yet are also far more comprehensible to me as speech than on the page. The many, many, digressions and explanations, (like the chapter that's basically just a list of things that are white, or the several chapters critiquing depictions of whales in art through the ages) are just my wordy pal Ishmael eager to tell me about his Special Interest, whales and whaling, and then sometimes he remembers he was supposed to be telling me about his specific whaling voyage. Some of the most enjoyable language in the whole book is in those sections. It's also very, very funny, and I fully missed out on the humor when struggling through the few chapters I finished the various times I tried to read it before.
In fact, whaling itself was a brutal, environmentally devastating practice and I'm glad it's illegal now, and I probably enjoyed myself the least while reading about the "real plot" parts of the book where the crew is actually hunting whales, as intense and dramatic as they are. The depictions of non-white characters are also very...of their time, even if I do fully believe that Melville was deliberately trying to subvert some of the assumptions about the "natural" superiority of the white officers of the ship.
Possibly my favorite chapter in the book consists of a series of the ship's crew reacting in turn to a gold doubloon with an elaborate design on it. It's a whole essay on reader-response theory, and it is absolutely aimed at readers of Moby-Dick and telling us, you will all see something different here.
Everyone knows the first line of Moby Dick is "Call me Ishmael", but actually the beginning of this book is a compilation of the words for whale across many languages and an extensive list of quotations about whales from literature and folk songs, and it is absolutely a harbinger of things to come.
And yet, I heard from some people whose opinions I respect that Moby-Dick is a lot of fun to read out loud, and that it's especially good to listen to as an audiobook. So, I decided it try it as an audiobook. And it turns out I maybe love Moby-Dick? Everything that bothered me about trying to read it on paper turns out to be a delight to listen to. The long, twisty sentences have a beautiful rhythm that is clearly not a naturalistic depiction of ordinary speech and yet are also far more comprehensible to me as speech than on the page. The many, many, digressions and explanations, (like the chapter that's basically just a list of things that are white, or the several chapters critiquing depictions of whales in art through the ages) are just my wordy pal Ishmael eager to tell me about his Special Interest, whales and whaling, and then sometimes he remembers he was supposed to be telling me about his specific whaling voyage. Some of the most enjoyable language in the whole book is in those sections. It's also very, very funny, and I fully missed out on the humor when struggling through the few chapters I finished the various times I tried to read it before.
In fact, whaling itself was a brutal, environmentally devastating practice and I'm glad it's illegal now, and I probably enjoyed myself the least while reading about the "real plot" parts of the book where the crew is actually hunting whales, as intense and dramatic as they are. The depictions of non-white characters are also very...of their time, even if I do fully believe that Melville was deliberately trying to subvert some of the assumptions about the "natural" superiority of the white officers of the ship.
Possibly my favorite chapter in the book consists of a series of the ship's crew reacting in turn to a gold doubloon with an elaborate design on it. It's a whole essay on reader-response theory, and it is absolutely aimed at readers of Moby-Dick and telling us, you will all see something different here.