I finished reading Moby-Dick mid-January as one of the goals I set myself for a New Year’s Resolution. Moby-Dick is one of those books you promise yourself you’ll read but never get around to it.
But if you do get around to it, Moby-Dick delivers a novel on an epic scale which rewards patient readers. It’s long and it’s hard to get into at first, because the opening chapters deal mainly with just Ishmael setting the scene for what happens in the rest of the novel – as well as his musings on the lives and times of his fellow whalers.
The novel is larger than life but contains a lot of realism about the details of maritime whaling history – references to maritime law, the process of whaling and the actual extraction of whale oil from the animal. It doesn’t sound like riveting reading but Melville is such a skilled writer that he ties together references to Shakespeare and the Bible with what is essentially a historically accurate (yet fictionalised) account of whaling times.
When I read a novel on the first go, I don’t normally go into too much detail lest I spoil the ending or something, but what I can say about the book outside of a literary appraisal is that if you have a young man who is getting into reading books in your family, they would do well to read this book out of the personal growth and perseverance they will develop over the course of reading and finishing one of the great novels of American literature. It’s not for everybody, and squeamish people who enjoy the idea of whales not suffering might be put off by it. But I’d definitely recommend reading it, because by teaching yourself to develop an attention span long enough to read an entire novel of this size and literary depth, you’re learning a skill you should be developing over the course of your entire life. Oh, and there’s musings on the human condition too. I give this book five stars.
* * * * *
Text Copyright © Jacob Martin 2010. All Rights Reserved. Image sourced from here.
No comments:
Post a Comment