A public house in Pittsfield, Mass. Two men are at the bar: the bearded man stands, the mustachioed man sits. They take a drink of ale and the bearded man speaks.

Melville: I'm doing it. I've decided.

Hawthorne: Doing what?

Melville: Writing my sodomy book.

Hawthorne: Herman...

Melville: Nathaniel...

Hawthorne: It is unwise.

Melville: Well...it's about sodomites more than sodomy.

Hawthorne: Why would you do this?

Melville: Sodomy exists, Nathaniel, and someone needs to write about it. It might as well be me.

Hawthorne: You will be crucified.

Melville: (laughing) By whom?

Hawthorne: Everyone! The critics, everyone. Your writing career will be over.

Melville: I've already begun the writing.

Hawthorne: It is a waste of time. You should stop. Write another sea tale.

Melville: Aaah, but that's why this is genius. It is a sea tale. I'm writing about whaling, a giant sperm whale, shipboard camaraderie, obsession. There'll be a chapter dedicated to ambergris...or lovemaking depending on your perspective. But no one will ever know it's about sodomites.

Hawthorne: Then why do it? If no one will know what you do then there is no point.

Melville: We'll know.

Hawthorne: I thought you were above such egotistical conceit.

Melville: It isn't conceit. This is a story that needs to be told. You haven't been to sea, Nathaniel. It is part of the life out there. Even for those of us who do not take part, sodomy is always there. It is the secret life of sailors. And this story needs to be told for them, for everyone.

Hawthorne: Yet they will not know. You say yourself that no one will know what you've written, just us. Just you and I.

Melville: Some others will know. Literate sailors. Sodomites. Some will figure it out. Not everyone will miss the point.

Hawthorne: That, then, is from whence the trouble will come. It is folly.

Melville shakes his head and pulls an empty stool over to rest on. Hawthorne finishes his ale and calls for another. A fresh mug is set before him

Hawthorne: So what are you calling it?

Melville: Moby-Dick.

Hawthorne: Subtle.

Melville: (shaking his head wryly) Just for that, I'm dedicating it to you.

Hawthorne: You wouldn't dare! (pause) Yes, yes you would.

Melville: Mmmmhmmm.

Hawthorne: What does Lizzy think?

Melville: She doesn't know.

Hawthorne: You are truly a fool, Herman. (Melville shrugs as Hawthorne raises his fresh ale in a toast) To folly.

Melville: I'll drink to that.

In the words of Ed Hillary, returning to base camp from summiting Everest, "We knocked the bastard off," and fairly quickly too.

So, what is there to say about this book that has had so much already written about it?
Did I enjoy reading it? I am unsure... I enjoyed some parts a lot, and in equal measure, there were parts I detested. But I have probably jumped ahead...

I am pretty sure I made an attempt at reading this before, but that memory is so vague I have not marked it so on GR. I know I never finished it, and I can't be sure if I even read enough pages to depart from Nantucket... but that is already quite an investment.

I recently read Nathanial Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea, and Moby Dick is obviously referenced fairly heavily. That book was a five star read, cramming in so much whaling and nautical history into a comparatively short book, and it reminded me that Moby Dick was not a book I had successfully completed... so I thought I better tackle it. This book is similar, in that it includes far, far more than the narrative of the whale hunt.

Having recently injured my Achilles tendon, I have had the pleasure, without too much guilt, of lounging about on the couch reading. This allowed me to wallow in Moby Dick more than I would normally have been able to justify...

So to the parts I liked:
- This isn't 'just' a novel. In fact large tracts if it don't fit into a fiction category at all. It is part scientific treatise, part history of whaling, part history of other random things, part choreographed stage play, part an exploration of mythology and of course part epic nautical adventure. Not only that, but it was all chopped in together.
- So I enjoyed significantly more the scientific and whaling history aspects that the others, but I found the hard transitions between various aspects were far less successful than those in Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea.
- Ishmael's narration - I have put this as a part I like, but it isn't without it's challenges. For the most part I enjoyed the narration of the story, but there were aspects told that he could not have had knowledge of. It is also ironic that Ishmael is such a minor character in the story itself, and for those who have read it  the only one to survive!
- Queequeg, as a character was great, a South-Seas Polynesian, from fictional Kokovoko, via New Zealand as described by Ishmael. His bromance with Ishmael was hilarious. P45, "Better [to] sleep with sober cannibal than a drunken Christian"... ha.

And the parts I struggled with:
- Chapter 9, The Sermon. This just about curtailed my reading of this novel. If for some unknown reason, you are reading my review and considering the novel... do yourself a favour and feel free to skip over this chapter of pain.
- The regular changes in style left me, at times, baffled as to what I had just read. It was in places such dense stream-of-consciousness writing that it was practically unmanageable.
- There were whole tracks of text that I couldn't reconcile as being relevant to the narrative. Baffling and almost unintelligible pages... the denser they became the more my eyeballs turned back in their sockets...
- The convoluted repetition got to me too - describing a single event two or three times with different words - just move on already, Melville, you are using up pages!
- Bulkington - I mean, why? Near the start we are given a whole explanation of him and how he will be Ishmael's companion on the Pequod, yet other than one (very) brief mention, he doesn't feature again in the entire novel!
- Anyone who has read my reviews already knows my analysis is always pretty simple. I am not good with analogies; I despise psychological assessments; I don't identify with spiritual aspects. There was too much of this for me.

On balance I have given four stars, as the parts I enjoyed have outweighed the aspects I didn't enjoy. The encyclopedic examination of whaling and whales was fantastic and added another layer on what I learned from Philbrick.

"I'm planning to start reading Moby-Dick," I messaged my wife.

"Is that supposed to cure your boredom??" she replied.

PART ONE: THE PRELUDE

Confession time: I studied English Education for four years, trained to be a high school English/Literature teacher, and yet never once cracked the cover on Moby-Dick. "Why bother?" I figured. "Somebody else has done the work already and everything that can be said must have been said by now." Yes, it was on some AP Literature "suggested reading" lists and it was offered as a class unto itself for seniors majoring in American Lit, but it never came up on a required course syllabus for me and I wasn't about to complain. If I did have to teach it to a class in the future, there would always be Cliff's Notes.

Confession continued: I do not like big books. Some readers love 'em, but not me. There are a handful of exceptions (obligatory plug for my personal white whale, Infinite Jest) but for the most part if a book goes past 350 pages I tend to lose interest. My feeling is, if you're going over that then you'd better have a darn good reason. I've always preferred minimalism, the Kurt Vonnegut approach, saying more with less. And Moby-Dick has the reputation of being just the opposite: the most overlong, overblown, overloaded novel of all. Critical consensus has it that Melville earns a pass on this, yet still every contemporary review cautions at some point: you will be bored.

Confession the third: I have grown into the smug literary hipster snob I used to mock as out-of-touch, trying too hard, and unbearable at parties. But now I'm a grown man, approaching middle age if not there already, and I find a lot of the dusty old "Classics" actually speak to me on a profound level. So maybe I won't have anything new to say about MD, but maybe that's OK. Maybe I don't need to say anything at all. Maybe I need to listen.

First things first: it's not as long as I thought. I always envisioned some thousand-plus page tome but my copy (W.W. Norton & Company's 1976 version, which I chose because it presents the full text with minimal commentary, limited to just a single chapter at the very end penned by one Howard Mumford Jones—now THERE'S a stodgy old literature critic name if I've ever heard one!) runs a total of 585 pages, glossary included. Sure, it'll make one hell of a thump if you drop it from any distance to your desktop. But it's not the forearm workout I feared. And as the last book of my 2018 reading challenge, I've got over a month to get through it. (50 days, a quick calendar consultation confirms. 12 pages a day? Seems do-able.)

Second things second: I already know the gist of it. It seems like it's about a whale but the whale is a symbol and it's really about obsession. The color white is important to pay attention to. I'm supposed to call him Ishmael, and he alone survives to tell the tale, and Ahab stabs at thee from Hell's heart but gets himself killed in the endeavor. I don't think anyone can cry foul over spoilers more than a hundred and sixty years old, and this sucker's so far intertwined into the popular culture that it'd be a miracle if I didn't already know how it ends. But this is about the journey, not the destination.

So I'll set sail on waters that have been charted and recharted already, and I'll keep my little reading log here so I can feel brainy for taking up this undertaking, here on the Internet haven for other brainy folks who love books so much we tell strangers what we think about them, where reading Moby-Dick is the norm and not the exception and joining your voice to the chorus of other reviewers is practically a rite of passage.


PART TWO: THE READ-THROUGH

This part took 32 days. That's a good long while for any avid reader.

Listen. Anybody can write a book, technically speaking. A much smaller set of people can write an interesting, entertaining, or at least coherent book. But very few people can write a Great Book, a.k.a. Literature. Moby-Dick more or less sets the bar, in my estimation, for what we all mean when we say "Great Book" or "Classic Literature," which is to say: big lofty ideas, conveyed via dense but memorable text, reproducing human drama of grave thematic import. As others have already noted, it's not difficult to read, per se. But I honestly would have loathed reading this as an assignment, working against a deadline. Because the further we move into modernity and the more removed we get from Melville's world, the more antiquated his dialect becomes and thus the true challenge arises: can you focus your attention long enough to read this? Will you? And do you want to? That's the difficulty of Moby-Dick, more so than the plot or the imagery or any of the thematic grandeur. Anybody can "get" Moby-Dick. Many(/most) people probably already have, without even actually reading it for themselves, since it's been around long enough to work its way into popular culture of all forms.

And so, if Mark Twain is the American Oscar Wilde then Melville is the American Charles Dickens. Has anybody written a term paper on that yet? I think I found my thesis.


PART THREE: THE REFLECTION

So, I read Moby-Dick.

It was worth it.

It was worth it the way that eating leafy green vegetables is worth it. You might not enjoy every bite while you're doing it, but someday down the road you'll be glad you did.

Moby-Dick is a cultural icon, a touchstone for bookworms, an American legacy, and a darn fine book. It is surprisingly entertaining despite its lulls and its length and its reputation as a chore to get through, and it is well-deserving of its status as a work of literary art. In fact, knowing the book's reputation and other readers' aspersions against it beforehand somehow made reading it much more tolerable. Every time it grew tedious, the knowledge that I was participating in a shared experience with all the readers and reviewers who'd come before me helped to carry me through. And the critical analysis comes easily, as Melville never obscures his message. Most of the theme is all but stated outright in plain language, and the sumptuous writing reinforces through tone what we are to take away from it all: from Ishmael's openness, from Queequeg's dual dignity, from Ahab's dark obsession.

5 stars out of 5. It couldn't possibly be any less.

Fuck me with a mincing knife such that I shit banana splits, but is this the most lushly, gorgeously written sea-skein of supernal and scotopic skaldic skill ever set to run before the trade winds for a voyage of six hundred and twenty-five pearlescent pages? Could aught be a more ariose attar of tars in cetological skin, a testimonial to the Old Testament wherein the primal and subcutaneous have pride of place and the canvas of the watery sprawl infinitely spread about the buffeted body shivers the soul unto a pastiche derived from the plasmic furnaces and vermicular warrens of chasms in origin oceanic and earthly; obsessive and repulsive; solar and abyssal?

Melville's great fluke has swept me from my perch amidships and cast me headlong unto a raging sea, what tempestuous, roiling vestments must carry me leagues afar ere a calm be found where I might gather my thoughts and bob in contemplation of both the evermore and nevermore, oblong and overwrought, whilst I await the succor of sails upon the horizon and curse Fedallah, that wizened Parsee flame vizier!

Some thoughts (of which a few, particularly towards the end, contain minor spoilage):

i: Best introductory sentence ever.

ii: Best introductory bromance established ever.

iii: Chapters like n  XXXVII: Sunsetn and n  XCIII: The Castawayn, though brief, build to such a crescendo of sustained and impassioned exhortation that it asphyxiates mentally and physically—I'd actually found myself not breathing for the final stretch—while, in interior quarters, I damn well saw poniard-finned and sail-fluked starbursts and fainted dead away.

iv: For all of Melville's rich and baroque timber to his words, his passionate embrace of the tale, each snippet panel of life is somberly interpreted and summarized, the banes and limits and dread tidal undertows of life assembled as a motte-and-bailey edifice against becoming carried away, whatever the desire attached to such vigorous enterprise. It's a rawboned force Man is up against, and he'd do well to heed the cautionary, well-lived words of the author, though the latter would not fain to rail against the living of life to the fullest—rather, that one must understand it's a thorny hedgerow to be traversed in breathed ways, under desert sun and polar stars, with many ghosts and chimeras set to whisper and cry and generally taunt one with cobwebbed doubloons cast upon the path; and tangled roots upthrust from ink-bound deeps to trip and lame one's progress.

v: Moby Dick is brimming throughout with humor sourced from the full complement of its founts—even when the events of a chapter's active spread are collated and pressed, via the somber rollers of Melville's weighty voice, unto a brew of bitters speaking to eye-agonies of starlight wherein gravity triumphs, that mirthful spirit—sardonic brow arched, comical ears perked, ironic ocular twinkled, jocular lips awry—retains its presence; a cetological oil spilled upon the briny and benighted waters of tide-flowed life, refusing to be subsumed within the whelm of its pathos and pain, its peril and phantasms, portents and apostasies.

vi: While his prophetic voice is timbered of the Platonic, his prognosticative agency blows from empirical quarters—and his sussing of how things would turn in the modern spin is remarkably acute and well-assessed. Even his calculation of the unlikelihood of the Leviathan being hunted unto evaporation from the boundless watery steppes, though erroneous in the end, struck much nearer to the truth than the pessimistic warnings cast about by his contemporary forecasters. There's little in the way of conventional discourse and relation, between Men together, or set opposite Nature and its incorporeal elements, that Melville failed to espy and set down, in glorious fictive exposition, at some point of unfolding within this wondrous book. Outstanding stuff.

vii: Notwithstanding that the author delineates the conjoined operations of a whaling expedition to the most minute detail, as well as digresses, upon whatever subject falls either to hand or his mind, at will and at length; that some characters, immediately upon attaining a favored placement within the pantheon of the reader's estimation, are banished from the narrative flow for an hundred pages or more; that this voice is as apt to launch, in the space of a salty blink, upon speculations of a philosophic, pedagogic, scientific, prophetic, or didactic nature; I was never bored for the space of a second, did not skim one single sentence. As in the best such novels, Melville is concerned with more than the simple telling of an episodic story, progressed in temporal proportionality—he is trying to stretch his authorial hands around, and grasp sufficient to set forth with substantiality, as much of the whole what comprises our existential essence—assemble, in theatrical form, the greater part of the pageant in which we shall be assigned a role—as is humanly possible: and to strain his reach unto the most ineffable, but spiritually enveloping and materially affecting, of all that will stamp itself upon our performance. Much as John Ralston Saul remarked upon the difference between the early form of the novel, in which the author—having garnered a wide experience from trying his hand to many tasks in life—set about informing the public of this myriad, to relate to them all of its collective variety, through the creative tale; as against its modern evolution, in which a solipsistic interiority speaks to one mind's awareness of its existential environs divided between body and spirit, and efforts, at times, to convey that tunneled-vision to the degree it might become universal; so Melville is a transitional performer herein—accomplishing a bounty of the former, while yet garnering sufficient of the latter that the whole becomes a rich melding of styles current at that time and barely gestating in future form. A man for all seasons, then, with a similarly emplaced story to tell...

viii: Death prevails throughout, and encapsulates the end. The first thing that struck me about Melville's style was how much it reminded me of Thomas Carlyle, with Emersonian flavoring—but there's also a direct link between Moby Dick and, say, Blood Meridian, particularly in the depiction of life as a hard and furious and magnetic interlude between the darkness eternal, and of how fates conspire, tragic flaws conflate, inexorable nature confound our efforts to stave off that irremediable end; indeed, hasten its reclamation because we are all—by dint of our awareness of its surceased claim—rendered mad in some way; not the least in that we shed so much blood on our own. Ahab's monomania is merely the most metastasized, in that his rage has warped him to try and make himself one with fate, a divine force of his own—he's a fascinating contrast with the similarly-maimed Captain Boomer, whose limb loss forged him in opposition to Ahab; or the captain of the Bachelor, a ship well-named in that none of its human crew are wed to aught but the pursuit of oil and profit (no White Whale as lethal bride for them—indeed, they believe that latter but a myth to detract from the true game at hand), and that their ship has voyaged immersed within merriment and joy, without any trace of the grim fanaticism that drives the Pequod forth under a permanent storm cloud; Puritans and fanatics are a force to keep the gravedigger well-employed in this world—though the White Whale shows how man's killing pursuit of Leviathan is just a microcosm, a mirror-play, of our own hunting by a world that lays all lifeforms low, and in which God is but a name we impose, with varying personal feeling and projected emotion and delusional imagining and despaired pleading, upon such a raw, unharnessed force that eludes our understanding and deceives us with a pride ere positioning the pair to be humbled. Somewhere (I can't precisely recall) I came across a reviewer discussing Moby Dick as a Gnostic work, which strikes me as a potent interpretation, though it requires an alien god whose light resides beyond our universe, and Melville proves himself quite able at snuffing out whatever hints of illumination send soulful beams from the music of the spheres.

ix: The narrative arc is truly fascinating, in that the tale begins from the solid observational perspective of Ishmael, a flesh-and-blood figure whose thoughts and relations, as he positions himself for cetaceous adventure, are of his immediate awareness—and then slowly progresses such that he abstracts himself while the figure of Ahab emerges as the magnetic focal point, of whose solo thoughts and room-shuttered soliloquies Ishmael would fain need have conjured out of thin air. The charismatic presence of this rage-fueled, iron-willed man—a skipper become absolute tyrant over the superstition-veined decency of Starbuck, the laugh-addled ineffectuality of Stubb, and the common-man ductility of Flask, let alone the pagan otherness of the swarthy harpooner triad—seems of a seaborne Napoleonic type who imperil their dominated collective, whatever system they maneuvered through to attain their preeminence. There are many futilities and fatalities and frailties that Melville delineated through the course of the book, and of which the narrator's curiosity-driven, malleable-formed openness to new experience and being expanded by life—rather than consumed in its ravenous operation, and during which obsessions ever emerge, full-formed, to burn the fuel faster and truer—was the only one that, fortune-kissed, proved able to survive the climactic tempest. I loved how Melville ejected Ishmael from Ahab's doomed boat as a nameless oarsmen set adrift, a nondescript figure seemingly served up as a bobbing meal for the encircling sharks—and it is only once the seas have calmed, and the tragedy been fully laid-bare, that this cipher, in a succinct italicized voice, reclaims the name of Ishmael with which he more forcefully and assuredly greeted the reader in what seemed a lifetime past. A rather ghostly whisper set to close the book upon Ahab's inflationary, captivating madness.

Many people warned me of this book so I ended up being quite apprehensive before starting. However, as is often the case (especially with classics as far as I can tell), I wasn‘t dismayed by the detailed descriptions of ships or whales.

But let‘s start at the beginning.

Moby Dick is one of THE American novels. It tells of Ishmael, the protagonist and narrator with one of the most famous opening lines in literature. Ishamel is a teacher but decides to go to sea so he enlists with the Pequod, a whaling ship from Nantucket. Captain of the ship is the famous Captain Ahab, a man driven half mad when a whale not only costs him one of his legs but also escapes afterwards.
Thus begins the journey of the Pequod‘s crew through the world oceans (not all of them but they are underway for quite a while) in search of the infamous white whale that someone, somehow, has named Moby Dick.
It is only natural that they do not come across the „right“ whale immediately and while they and we readers are waiting, Melville proceeds to describe life on board a whaling ship. These descriptions range from the ship itself, the crew living with one another, sailing, what whalers did with the carcasses of whales when they caught one, religion, race, history and so much more. It becomes clear fairly quickly that he was an accute observer and thought long and hard about all the topics he addressed in his writing. Moreover, for a man of his skin colour and time, he was relatively open and progressive.
There are some ridiculous instances where the openminded Ishmael describes his view that any religion has its place and that none is better than the other, seconds after which he details how this or that ritual of an „exotic“ religion is silly or unnecessary. So yes, the book had some comedic moments as well (whether on purpose or not is another matter).
Oh and let‘s not forget the homosexual encounter in the beginning! I did NOT expect that but I like that he put it in there (again: whether he was aware of its significance or not is another matter).

As for the writing itself, Melville was certainly very erudite. This combined with the research he must have conducted for this book results in all the details being accurate (for the time this was written in) and giving a 360-view on the world of whaling, be it on the construction and handling of a ship or the anatomy of whales (though I got aggressive whenever one of these whale-murderers called the animals „fish“).

The fascinating thing about the book’s form is that the author often wrote as if it was a stage play. That is to say there are actual stage directions. Moreover, Ishmael, while telling the story, sometimes „disappears“ inside his own narrative, being fully submerged in the events, only to resurface some time later as the narrator.

It‘s a story about obsession and revenge but also about other people letting themselves be drawn into other peoples‘ fights. It‘s about men who just want to earn a living in a period when several nations around the world committed horrible atrocities against the whale populations of this planet (and even commenting at one point how, just like elephants on the plains of Africa, there would always be enough of them because look at how much space they have to live in *doh*).

This might not be the best classic I‘ve ever read but it is in a class of its own (I could be more detailed with a 10-star rating system but we don‘t have that so ...).

I HATE whaling. It‘s one of the things that makes me positively despise certain Scandinavian countries as well as Japan (and nobody give me that silly excuse about „scientific research“). Reading about a whale being caught and what was subsequently done with it was therefore hard, but it‘s science/history and I had already read a non-fiction book about what inspired Melville to write this novel. Nevertheless, I wanted them all to die horribly. Just like the people who fin sharks.
All I can say is that the ending thus is very satisfying for someone like me. I‘ve read somewhere that the ending leaves the readers without any solace but I disagree: it offers solace aplenty for anyone who, like me, is #teamwhale. ;)

بالاخره تموم شد! باورم نمیشه! بالاخره موبی دیک هم تموم شد! :))
بعد از یک مدت طولانی که شاید اگر همین مدت رو کتاب روان‌تری می‌خوندم می‌تونستم ده دوازده کتاب رو تموم کنم!
موبی دیک به ظاهر یک رمان هشتصد صفحه‌ایه که نهایتا طی مدت دو هفته تموم خواهد شد.
اما نه، ادبیات سخت و ترجمه‌ی به شدت چالش برانگیزش و البته طولانی بودنش، باعث میشه که چهار پنج برابر زمان قانونی، خوندنش وقت ببره!

اگر نخوام داستان کتاب رو لو بدم، هیچ اطلاعاتی هم نمی‌تونم ازش ارایه کنم!
اما بطور کلی، موبی دیک برای من، بعضا سرد و کسالت آور بود! کسالت آور نه از نظر داستان، نه از نظر شیوه بیان، نه از نظر ترجمه و نه از نظر فضاسازی‌ها و شخصیت ها!! بلکه کسالت آور از اون نظر که بیشتر حجم کتاب، نویسنده به شرح چیزهایی پرداخته که شاید به گوش متخصصین رشته‌های خاص (!) شیرین و جذاب بیاد ولی برای خواننده‌ی ساده، چیزی جز ملال و کسالت به همراه نداره!
مثال می‌زنم، من که یک خواننده‌ی معمولی با سطح اطلاعات دریایی و کشتیرانی تقریبا صفر هستم، برای من هیچ جذابیتی نداره هفت هشت فصل در مورد انواع طناب‌ها و آلات کشتی و شکار نهنگ بخونم، اون هم نه یک روخوانی و متن ساده، بلکه چندین فصل توضیحات مفصل با متنی به شدت سخت‌خوان و محتوایی پیچیده و البته با اطلاعاتی ناکارآمد نسبت به خط داستان که هیچ کمکی به درک بهتر خواننده از کتاب نمی‌کنه!
اگر نامردی نکنم، کل خط داستانی کتاب، کمتر از چهل درصد از کل متن رو تشکیل میده و شصت درصد دیگه‌ی کتاب، توضیحات و تفسیرات پیرامون کشتی و وال و دریانوردی هست که واقعا برای من به شخصه هیچ جذابیتی نداشت!
بارها پیش می‌اومد که تشنه‌ی خوندن موبی دیک بودم، کتاب رو برمی‌داشتم و شروع می‌کردم و پیش می‌رفتم و پیش می‌رفتم و پیش می‌رفتم، ولی اصلا به داستان نمی‌رسیدم و کل اون شب، توضیحات دریانوردی می‌خوندم و یا اطلاعاتی پیرامون انواع و اقسام وال و ماهی! که خب خیلی توی ذوقم می‌خورد!
تنها مشکل کتاب همین مساله بود، که البته ظاهرا انتشارات مختلفی هستن که خلاصه‌ی کتاب رو دارن و توصیفات ناکارآمد رو حذف کرده و فقط بخش داستان رو چاپ کردن! اگر مثل من حال خوندن توصیفات اضافی رو ندارین، یکی از اون کتاب‌های خلاصه رو بخونید.

ترجمه‌ی کتاب هم فکر می‌کنم انقدر کامل و بزرگ و شاهکار بود که بهتره من حقیر، با سواد کمم در موردش حرفی نزنم! که خب همه‌مون می‌دونیم انتشارات نیلوفر جزو بهترین‌هاس، اگر بهترین نباشه!

در کل موبی دیک کتاب خوبیه، البته نه برای من که از کلاسیک‌خوانی در فرارم! :)) این کتاب می‌تونه کابوس کسانی باشه که از ادبیات کلاسیک احساس خستگی و بی‌حوصلگی و ملال می‌کنن! :))

امتیاز واقعی من به موبی دیک سه و نیم ستاره هست، که به دلیل کلاسیک بودنش و توضیحات زیادی از صبر من، به سه ستاره روندش می‌کنم!

The narrator of this flabbergasting marine saga is an impecunious but very erudite young man possessing a sarcastic sense of humour and having a tongue-in-cheek attitude to life…

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago – never mind how long precisely – having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation.

Often Ishmael tends to speak in a metaphysical vein and somewhat on the agnostic side…

Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air.

The novel is packed with bizarre personages – even all the secondary characters are weird… Elijah is a gloomy prophet… Three harpooners: Queequeg, Tashtego and Daggoo are three pagan magi… And the biblical names of the main participants literally seal their fates: Ishmael – an easy rover, Ahab – an evil ruler, who turned a gigantic sperm whale into his sinister deity and deadly antagonist…

Captain Ahab stood erect, looking straight out beyond the ship’s ever-pitching prow. There was an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate, unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless, forward dedication of that glance.

And above all there is Moby Dick – an albino leviathan – monstrous Baal – the remorseless instrument of doom…

“Corkscrew!” cried Ahab, “aye, Queequeg, the harpoons lie all twisted and wrenched in him; aye, Daggoo, his spout is a big one, like a whole shock of wheat, and white as a pile of our Nantucket wool after the great annual sheep-shearing; aye, Tashtego, and he fan-tails like a split jib in a squall. Death and devils! men, it is Moby Dick ye have seen – Moby Dick – Moby Dick!”

Gods – even if they are a pure fiction – still reign over human destinies.

Moby Dick is the Great American Novel. Nothing else from North America can stand with Dante, Shakespeare, Dumas, Dickens, Tolstoy, and the like. William Faulkner may be the greatest of American authors, but nothing in his vast catalog quite measures up to Herman Melville’s opus. It is cited in various publications that Faulkner named Moby Dick as a book he wished he’d have written.

It is both modernist and romantic, nearly as digressive as The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman: nearly equaling the adventure in a completely different type of classic, The Three Musketeers. It is an encyclopedic epic—some other examples being Ulysses, Foucault’s Pendulum, Infinite Jest, and Gould’s Book of Fish.

Ernest Hemingway wrote to his publishers in the late 1940s and cited Melville as one of the writers he was “still trying to beat.” This he never accomplished. We honor Hemingway’s blue-gill sized yarn, The Old Man and the Sea, but how puny that is when compared to this Whale Tale.

A list of venerable literature that mentions the whale starts things off, like a myth. The whale is the “Salt-Sea Mastodon.”

Much of the book is an ode to the sea. And of course the sea represents so many things, but mainly the unknown.

Even early on, one can tell Moby Dick is one of the rare books seeming to contain the whole world in its finite pages.

But is not long before we find our author rather gloomy: “…this earthly air, whether ashore or afloat, is terribly infected with the nameless miseries of the numberless mortals who have died exhaling it…” Even if not without hope: “…man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature…” Nearly all misanthropes were molded first by the unrequited love of their fellow humans. All noble things are touched with some melancholy.

Our narrator, Ishmael, is progressive, philosophical, and inquisitive. Upon meeting Queequeg, a “clean, comely-looking cannibal”, we get these lines: “A man can be honest in any sort of skin,” (Queequeg being covered in tattoos) and, “Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian,” the idea of judging one another on individual merit, rather than by preconceptions. Melville’s forward-thinking ideas about “savages” align him with Rousseau.

Finally aboard the Pequod and ready to set sail, we find that the harpooner is to the lancer as the squire was to the knight. There is even a bit of The Canterbury Tales in Moby Dick.

Once out of the frigid temperatures of the Atlantic near Nantucket and into agreeable weather, Ishmael displays more of his skilled prosody, “…when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April and May, trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods; even the barest, ruggedest, most thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some few green sprouts to welcome such glad-hearted visitants…”

But the sun does not warm Ahab, who infrequently takes over for Ishmael, either in soliloquy or in thought, and he is a different kind of narrator, character, and man. Monomaniacal is used many times to describe his obsession with the murder of Moby Dick.

Captain Ahab is a monster, a hero, a villain; but perhaps above all, he is a poet, an insightful psychologist. He’s of one mind with Dostoevsky when he says, “This lovely light, it lights not me; all loveliness is anguish to me, since I can ne’er enjoy. Gifted with the high perception, I lack the low, enjoying power; damned, most subtly and most malignantly! Damned in the midst of Paradise!”

There is no way of knowing, but Dostoevsky probably never read Moby Dick, as Melville was not known internationally in his day. In his 1886 novel, Crime and Punishment (Moby Dick was published in 1851), Fyodor writes, “Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness.”

Melville’s pessimism sometimes seems to come straight from Arthur Schopenhauer; however, we only have proof that he read the German philosopher later in life. Like Rousseau, we can either speculate that Melville was familiar with him before writing Moby Dick or that he came to similar conclusions independently. Like in many of these situations, it was probably a bit of both. We know less about his influences, outside of the Bible and Shakespeare, than we do about whom he’s influenced. James Joyce never mentions reading Melville, but it seems possible that the Irishman came upon the idea for writing a chapter in Ulysses in the form of a play from Moby Dick.

An interesting aside: a night of drinking on the ship sees the sailors and harpooners sing a song, a Napoleonic ballad called, “Spanish Ladies.” This song is also sung in the 1970s movie, Jaws, by the ship captain in that film who leads the attempt to find and kill the man-eating great white shark.

Ishmael has been on ships before, and though he is able to see the wonder in the world, he can also reduce the grandness of global travel to lyrical cynicism: “Were this world an endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could forever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise in the voyage. But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in tormented chase of that demon phantom that, some time or other, swims before all human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed.”

There is an entire section that reads as if Melville had already read a copy of Darwin’s, On the Origin of Species. But that book was published almost a decade later. We are given a surprisingly accurate explanation of the taxonomy of cetaceans, not without its errors but still prescient. It is a satisfying portion where we see that even something as hideous as whaling has taught us much about the world. The baleen of the right whales, Humpbacks, etc, is described as looking rather like Venetian blinds. The amount of oil each whale species can produce is logged as well.

After a literal and rather complex description of the whale lines and their danger, we get this beautiful and poignant metaphor: “All men live enveloped in whale lines. All are born with halters around their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turns of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whaleboat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.”

Despite the quality of the book as a whole, the first description of a successful whale hunt is every bit as gruesome and hard to read as one might imagine. The force that propelled the evolution of certain land mammals into fully aquatic animals, whales, did not account for the coming of man, the building of ships, the mastheads of said ships, and the deadly call of the watch, “There she blows!” The fate of so many creatures sealed by the otherwise ingenious adaptation of the blowhole. For no matter how deep the whale sounds, he must inevitably surface to expel his air, thus perpetually signaling to the death-ship his location. This brings the lowering of the whaleboats, the line of the harpoon, and the sting of the lance.

The killing of the whale is sad and atrocious—blood spouting from the blowhole—necessarily torturous. What humans are able to do, though sometimes amazing, is often horrendous.

The description of “cutting in” the whale is almost as rough as the hunt and the killing. The blubber is rolled off with a line pulled by the windlass—a hook and a couple of spades begin the cut into the dead whale. Sharks must constantly be fended off. This whaling business was truly a rough trade. That was one of Melville’s aims: to show the harshness and the barbarity. But there is always admiration in Ishmael’s descriptions. This is why the measurements and the listing of the different whales are important parts of the book. They show the respect for whaling and the whale that the narrator possesses.

Ishmael often admires the battering ram capabilities and other qualities of the sperm whale. This love he has for the whale, and the compassion he shows for life in general, mitigates some of the horror of the book. The whalemen who hunt sperm whales are at the top of the heap. They think of hunting any other species as an inferior endeavor.

Melville seems to be writing for posterity. There is no way a contemporary human can comprehend the whaling profession of the mid-19th century. At least we have this work to tell us a little about it—the immensity, the danger, the thrill; and despite the wrongness and cruelty in killing such a smart, curious, and gentle creature, a giant dog in the sea, we can tell it took some kind of man to be a whaleman. The kind of danger involved ended with the invention of exploding harpoons. Humans are hard to beat when it comes to destruction. “There is no folly of the beasts of earth that is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.”

Another harrowing whale hunt shows more of Melville’s sardonic, misanthropic disdain. We are not spared any detail, but I will spare the reader here and only say that the maiming and killing of one poor whale was almost too much to bear.

For what is all this murdering? “But pity there was none. For all his old age, and his one arm (fin), and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gray bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all.”

Above all books on which to linger, there is Moby Dick—to study cetology, the evolution of whales, to discover arcane words and obscure references. And like all the great books, not all the learning is academic.

Most chapters begin with the goings on of the ship; but after these practicalities are described, we get interesting observations both sorrowful and inspiring. Not only is the chief narrator, Ishmael, full of high-minded thought, but the brief sojourns into the minds of Ahab and Starbuck (the first mate) give us recondite but beautiful language.

The future of whales is pondered. Can they survive the onslaught? Melville thinks a bit too much of both man and the leviathan. He could not foresee the aforementioned exploding harpoons, the endless entanglements caused by discarded fishing lines and nets, collisions with cruise ships—ships of a size that a sailor from the 19th century could never imagine.

The book is tangential, meant to meander. There is no guilt of prolix. So timeless is the work that it is frozen in the infinite.

The narrator knows he must accept the world of whaling for what it is—a nasty business--but one where beauty and awe are found. The birth of a sperm whale is described, and this gives us some needed humaneness.

Ishmael loves the whale, but he must hunt him, help kill him. He must ruminate on things for which there are no answers. He must describe the feelings for which there are no words. The whale is the world and the world is the whale.

Sometimes, a beautiful morning begins a chapter, but we know this is not for long. Blood and death are the order of the day. Ahab says, “Were I the wind, I’d blow no more on such a wicked, miserable world.”

No matter if the reader comes to enjoy Ishmael’s musings, laugh at Stubb’s humor in the face of danger, admire Queequeg’s sincerity and courage, or take interest in Ahab’s poetic fatalism, the whale is the hero. Any respectable reader must root for Moby Dick to break the planks of every boat. One must hope for the giant flukes to smash the oars, lances, and harpoons to bits. Unlike Jonah, all aboard the Pequod can take the whale’s belly for their cemetery.

But Melville knows exactly how to end his tour de force. His is like all the great misanthropic minds—all those who realize humanity’s overreaching ways are not only harmful to the earth’s other inhabitants but also harmful to humanity. He makes us wish there were a great creature, on land or sea, too massive and powerful for humans to defeat. It might do a lot to temper our arrogance. If only there were beasts we still had to fear, adventures left to take.

In a last bit of irony, it is the coffin fitted for Queequeg and repurposed as a lifeboat that resurfaces at the end of it all to save Ishmael. The sharks won’t bother him at this point; even nature knows that someone must tell this story.

Brilliant, timeless novel.

I read it over the course of a few months in 2010, the year I was a Corps Member in Obama's socialist militia- I mean, Americorps. I read about half of it in New Orleans, perhaps a chapter or two during our week between projects at the VA in Perry Point, Maryland, right on the Chesapeake, and the rest while staying at Lafayette's Quarters in Valley Forge, where our workdays were spent picking mile-a-minute and hunting invasive crayfish. So yes, Moby-Dick took me a while, and a few different states, and a couple of uncanny experiences (Lafayette's Quarters are haunted), to read. It's long and digressive, and I wouldn't change a word. Melville's language, and the interplay between the reality of life on the ship and his mystical inclinations, is incredibly evocative and beautiful.

It's also a book that's intimidating to write about, since I can't help but assume that everything's been said. But for my own sake if nothing else, I'm going to record a few of the commonplaces that bounced around in my skull this morning while I drove to Wawa in the rain. That life is full of disappointment and injustice, for example. Some things can be mitigated, and some things are simply beyond our control. Sometimes a whale takes your leg, and you can't change that. The only thing you can control- perhaps- is how you live with it.

In Moby-Dick, Ahab allows himself to become bitter. His bitterness disfigures him as a human being, and develops into a grudge against the universe. But one of the great things about the novel is that Melville, far from holding Ahab up for mockery and cheap shots, shows that such people possess an incredible magnetism. This magnetism isn't bestowed by Wotan, Loki, or even the Koch brothers, but by the simple fact that people like Ahab are saying what, on some level, we long to hear. Isn't that the only way propaganda ever really works? Yes, Ahab seems to say, we're born into a hostile universe, and the only satisfying response is a rebellion against nature. People like him inspire that impulse in ourselves, and make us feel that it's grand and heroic. He isn't a con man, he's sincere, and in that chapter where he seems able to control the lightning, you almost believe that his rebellion can win. Melville throughout the novel uses the mysteriousness of the ocean to suggest that we don't really know nature as well as we might think. Who can say for sure that it doesn't wish us ill? Maybe Ahab is right after all?

Except that Ahab is evil. He's evil, quite simply, because he rejects life. He rejects the factual world by insisting that a whale consciously intended to maim him. He's evil because of his terrible sentimentality- his willingness (desire, even) to sacrifice the lives of his entire crew to satisfy his vengefulness. He's evil not because of an idea he possesses but because of an idea that he's allowed to possess him- that he must annihilate or be annihilated. Perhaps those twin desires are simply one fantasy of death. The alternative must be between those extremes.

And the only mode in which you can derive even a tolerable idea of his living contour,
is by going a whaling yourself; but by so doing, you run no small risk of being eternally stove and sunk by him. Wherefore, it seems to me you had best not be too fastidious in your curiosity touching this Leviathan.

Melville employs a fragment of Job 1:15 for the epigram of the epilogue: "...and I only am escaped alone to tell thee." In the same way, the reader, after 625 pages of pure sublime masterwork, escapes alone to tell others of the experience. And it is a large, profound experience. As Melville says himself, through his surrogate Ishmael, "To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme" (497). Having found success with his first two novels, n  Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Lifen and n  Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seasn, and then failure with his third, n  Mardi and a Voyage Thithern, a dense philosophical work, Melville seems to have found the Aristotelian golden mean in the Genesis of American literature: the mighty n  Moby-Dick or, The Whalen.

I avoided the book for a long time, daunted as I was by its heft and, well, age and subject matter. Yet, as Thomas C. Foster points out in his book n  How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Linesn, it was really my own age that was the impasse: "...[Moby-Dick] succeeds by rules of narrative that not many people can grasp (especially at the age of seventeen or twenty, when most of us get fouled in its lines)" (243). Indeed, a book like this makes tall demands of its readership. For example, one should at least be conversational about the n  Tanakh: The Holy Scripturesn, especially in its King James translation; one should have at least a basic familiarity with the great Shakespearean tragedies and its chief figures (Lear, Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth); and one should have an understanding of the major metaphysical arguments before and of Melville's time (Hume versus Kant; free will versus determinism, etc.). But, really, above all, the n  King James Bible Touchn is paramount. As the great Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye has it in his book n  The Great Code: The Bible and Literaturen, "...a student of English literature who does not know the Bible does not understand a good deal of what is going on in what he reads" (xii).

Melville's great book suffers from the same social stigma as so many others, the Bible included. Along with, say, n  The Scarlet Lettern, n  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finnn, and n  Uncle Tom's Cabinn, people have heard so much about the books, that they feel they have already read them. This sentiment leads to Italo Calvino's cheeky definition of a classic in his book n  Why Read the Classics?n as being a book that one is always "re-reading," never reading for the first time. To be sure, this can also be because one is embarrassed to admit that one has not read some great work or another before. For myself, I didn't read Moby-Dick until 8 years ago, at age 24, in grad school. And even then, my professor didn't do much to give me a leg up when she said, "I'm sorry to do this, but, you'll have to do a close-reading of Moby-Dick; there's no way around it." Luckily, though I didn't quite take to it on the first reading as I did on this second reading, the experience was peculiar and never left me. When I attempted to negatively criticize it, my arguments were glaringly thin. Harold Bloom, in n  The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Agesn sums it up best when he says, "When you read a canonical work for a first time you encounter a stranger, an uncanny startlement rather than a fulfillment of expectations" (3).

In general, it is the opening sentence (featured on a coffee mug of famous opening sentence I bought at the NYPL) and the mad Ahab out to catch the white whale that people know of the book. Scarcely much more, save for maybe the ambiguity of the dynamic between Ishmael and Queequeg. To know only these two elements of the main plot of the book is to know very little of its bulk, for these takeaways can be gleaned from the first chapter and last three chapters. There are still 131 other chapters! Another stigma that has attached itself to the book like a barnacle to a whale is that it is bloated with outdated whaling lore and purports to be an encyclopedia of whaling. Like most stigmas, there is truth to this, but allow me to assert my argument for undertaking such a reading project as this without resorting to abridgment.

Spending, let's say, a month of your life reading Moby-Dick is not to spend a month reading only one book. It is to spend a month reading through a library: "There are certain books that, in themselves, are an ideal library. Examples: Moby-Dick...." (269, n  A Reader on Readingn). Again, like the Bible (which is also considered a library), this book is not a novel; it is composed of plays, poems, prose poems, narrative, essays, scholarly treatises, philosophy, theology, and more. Melville displays his acumen as a sort of polyglot of genres. Where Cervantes gives us interpolated stories, Melville gives us interpolated essays. Through Ishmael, we get a genius's thoughts on all manner of the popular and the esoteric (Melville was considerably well read) synthesized into the metaphor of the human pushing to the brink of madness to capture an elusive whale. The more I think about this major theme of the book, the more I realize how inclusive, how universal it is. Yet, it is distinctly American. Whereas Faust sold his soul to Mephistopheles, Ahab looks to himself to obtain his goal.

Approaching the book in thirds is a good way to plan your reading project. The first third introduces the principal characters and sets us off on the Pequod on Christmas Day (i.e. Christ's traditional birth date). The second third gives us the weight of scholarly discourse on whaling, but Melville rewards the alert reader with constant dips into the poetic and philosophical modes. Finally, the last third, the extended climax of the book, pays off with dividends for the efforts of the reader. This is a book best read at a slow pace. I recommend no more than 20 pages a day, in order to properly ingest and absorb the glut of its offerings.

The undeniable standout character is, of course, that black hole Ahab, into which everything on its event horizon is pulled and out of which nothing escapes. Melville transcends himself with Ahab. The Shakespearean soliloquies (for even when he speaks to others, he is really just speaking to himself) take up the torch passed from Shakespeare to Milton and now to Melville. Ahab captures the viscera of the American spirit in a way that Ishmael just cannot, clinging to Reason above all. Where Ishmael says "give me the privilege of making my own summer with my own coals," Ahab, in the face of death, proclaims, "to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee" (12, 623).

I glance through all of my marginalia, Post-it notes, highlighting, etc., and I am overwhelmed with all there is to say of this great book. Perhaps one day I will set to the task of distilling all of these notes and thoughts into a long essay (really, only another book will come closer to doing it justice), but--alas--I must bring this "review" to a close. Suffice it to say this: In Job 41:1, God says to Job, "Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook?" Melville's Ahab answers with a mad, "Yes, I can." Who would not want to read a book written about the man who, unlike Job, set out to defy God's limitation on mankind? A mighty theme indeed.

I've had a copy of this novel for many years now. Every time I have moved, or done some extensive spring cleaning, which usually involves rearranging bookshelves, I would come across it and be reminded that I still hadn't read it. I was daunted by its reputation, both as a (or perhaps even the) Great American Novel, and a boring, unreadable novel. When I finally began it for myself it was with some trepidation, and a determination to finish it no matter how dull it might be.

To my surprise, the early chapters are engaging, interesting and quickly draw you. I wondered how people could find this boring -- everything was great! I didn't mind the meticulous descriptions of every detail. It was insightful and even funny. I was marking pages with great lines or paragraphs constantly. Ishmael and Queequeg were an excellent duo (couple?) and I would happily follow them anywhere.

This view mostly remained, though I did soon come to understand what people meant. Once at sea the action, the plot, falls away. The book was already quite eclectic, at times reading like a play, often veering off in unexpected directions --- I found this fun and strange. Eventually Melville seems determined to cover every aspect of whales, whaling, and the whaling industry. His passion for the whalers, (especially for those from Nantucket) is immense. At times the deluge of information is exhausting----there is a chapter devoted to rope, for example. What it is made out of, how it is used, how it is stored. I'm never sure if these parts are told from the character's, so Ishmael's view, or if it is solely Melville. Either way, his enthusiasm is comprehensive and while there are moments when I wanted him to remember he was writing a novel not a textbook, I found his obsessive relaying of all this information relatable. He seems to be channeling all he knows about the topic into the book (or am I projecting?) I'm no stranger to launching into a detailed description of a subject I adore, only to realise my enthusiasm is not matched by the person I am talking to.
In the end I admired him for it and am glad he went to such efforts. Admittedly I liked the chapters more once I had finished reading them, BUT, I am glad they were there. Not only did I learn a lot (though how much of it I will retain is uncertain) it also serves as a kind of relic of, or monument to, a fairly short, brutal, very specific time in history.

The actual depictions of whaling were more graphic than I had expected. These were difficult chapters to read, and I wished I could have been reading them with the comforting thought that whaling no longer took place, but unfortunately I can't soothe myself with that. Melville seems to view whaling as a glorious thing -- I don't agree, but I do think he succeeded in writing an epic and oddly beautiful tribute to it.

As much as I ended up loving it, I can see why so many don't. I don't really keep track of a star rating while I read, because I want to focus on the book as I am experiencing it, not think too strongly about how I am judging it, but if I did it would have veered wildly from an easy five stars to a half-hearted two stars. I can't deny that I did often find it tough-going, and I'm pretty sure that aspects of it went over my head. I think it's a book to read and reread, so maybe one day I'll return to it and see if that's true for me too. Not for a while though! This took me months to read, and I think if it had been the only book I was reading I would have given up on it. Allowing myself to read it a few chapters at a time (and even take a month or two away from it altogether) helped a lot. It also gave me time to think about it carefully. I think that's why it ended up being a book I did love -- I spend a lot of time with it, whether it was in the actual reading of it, or in the hours I puzzled over it, , and ultimately I found it really worthwhile.

I found this article an interesting read, and it's worth a read if you are trying to decide whether or not to attempt reading the book:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...