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immaturetony 's review for:
Moby-Dick: Or, the Whale
by Herman Melville
Opens with a much funnier welcome into its world than I expected, like “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles (and Whaling Vessels?)” with Queequeg the cannibal playing John Candy’s part.
The contrast of that with the long descent into doomed madness the book makes sail for thereafter is extraordinary.
Ishmael narrates the sprawling voyage in a sublimely messy, idiosyncratic way, at turns pretentiously philosophical and at others caught up in the grimy, salty details of being tossed into the shit with his crewmates. He earnestly flits about all kinds of historical, mythic, religious, and cultural framings of present happenings without ever settling on any one with much solidity.
These contradictions within Ishmael - beholding “the whale” as near-god as he uses its carcass oil to light the lamp he writes by - is what made the whole thing resonate for me.
And who among us but the very young can’t relate to the feeling life is a boulder rolling with too much momentum to stop now, tipped by choices long past down one hill or another?
Last hundred pages were metal as hell.
The contrast of that with the long descent into doomed madness the book makes sail for thereafter is extraordinary.
Ishmael narrates the sprawling voyage in a sublimely messy, idiosyncratic way, at turns pretentiously philosophical and at others caught up in the grimy, salty details of being tossed into the shit with his crewmates. He earnestly flits about all kinds of historical, mythic, religious, and cultural framings of present happenings without ever settling on any one with much solidity.
These contradictions within Ishmael - beholding “the whale” as near-god as he uses its carcass oil to light the lamp he writes by - is what made the whole thing resonate for me.
And who among us but the very young can’t relate to the feeling life is a boulder rolling with too much momentum to stop now, tipped by choices long past down one hill or another?
Last hundred pages were metal as hell.