A review by richardleis
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe, Richard Kopley

3.0

I'm not really sure what to make of Edgar Allan Poe's only novel. It has brilliant and adventurous moments, but it also has racist, tedious, boring, deranged, and graphic and gory passages, resulting in an unholy creation with a baffling and abrupt ending (or is it an allegorical ending?) What works is how Poe can't help but to infuse the novel with a sense of the uncanny. What doesn't work are obvious narrative mistakes (uh, Poe, you can't kill that character off after earlier in the story saying he was alive years later) and sudden passages of exposition that read like an early 19th Century Wikipedia.

Nevertheless, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, as baffling as it is, remains a fascinating work.