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steve_pikov 's review for:
Moby Dick
by Herman Melville
With growing older comes the realization that "it's now or never" for many classic books, so it was in this spirit that I tackled Moby Dick. Unfortunately, Herman Melville needed a better editor, for within the book's nearly 600 pages is a classic 200-page novel. The remainder is a non-fiction book in the voice of a fictional narrator on the state of whaling in the mid-1800s; before the Civil War and Canadian Confederation.
If I was the stereotypical American high school teacher assigning this bane of students for their reading, I would only specify the plot-related chapters. Every phase of the whaling operation is discussed in painful detail, from the functions of each part of the whaling ship and its boats, a general taxonomy of aquatic mammals, differences in anatomy between sperm whales (the high school students are giggling and nudging each other) and right whales, and details of the butchering of whales, harvesting their spermicetti, and rendering their blubber into whale oil.
The plot is well-known to anyone who has seen the classic movie with Gregory Peck and Richard Basehart, and I have no doubt that Peter Jackson (or even Baz Luhrmann) will one day tackle it for contemporary viewers. I believe Classics Illustrated comics also gave it a fair treatment years ago. Ahab's obsessive last words to the titular whale will also be familiar to viewers of Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan.
The world has changed much since the time of Melville's writing. We know much more about the intelligence of whales, and whaling has fallen out of favour. There is much racial stereotyping in the book, as was common for those times, except perhaps for Ishmael's companion Queequeg, who is given a rare degree of depth. The book is an historical curiosity, with refreshing playfulness in portions of Melville's writing style, and occasional soliloquies in blank verse with internal rhymes. Read it if you will, but as with S. Morgenstern's book-within-a-book of The Princess Bride, stick with the "good parts version".
If I was the stereotypical American high school teacher assigning this bane of students for their reading, I would only specify the plot-related chapters. Every phase of the whaling operation is discussed in painful detail, from the functions of each part of the whaling ship and its boats, a general taxonomy of aquatic mammals, differences in anatomy between sperm whales (the high school students are giggling and nudging each other) and right whales, and details of the butchering of whales, harvesting their spermicetti, and rendering their blubber into whale oil.
The plot is well-known to anyone who has seen the classic movie with Gregory Peck and Richard Basehart, and I have no doubt that Peter Jackson (or even Baz Luhrmann) will one day tackle it for contemporary viewers. I believe Classics Illustrated comics also gave it a fair treatment years ago. Ahab's obsessive last words to the titular whale will also be familiar to viewers of Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan.
The world has changed much since the time of Melville's writing. We know much more about the intelligence of whales, and whaling has fallen out of favour. There is much racial stereotyping in the book, as was common for those times, except perhaps for Ishmael's companion Queequeg, who is given a rare degree of depth. The book is an historical curiosity, with refreshing playfulness in portions of Melville's writing style, and occasional soliloquies in blank verse with internal rhymes. Read it if you will, but as with S. Morgenstern's book-within-a-book of The Princess Bride, stick with the "good parts version".