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Once again, time to give a try to an excessively-long 19th century novel! I was genuinely unsure, going into this one, whether I would like it or not, but I DO like a) stories about ships and b) people enthusiastically sharing facts about the natural world, so I figured I would at least give it a try.
I was pretty dubious by about 150 pages in; I was just finding myself so bored! But I figured I would at least wait it out until the book actually took us to sea, because that might change things.
And it did!
It turns out that the key is that the first 150 pages seem like they're trying to be an ordinary sort of narrative but are just bad at that, but by the time you get to sea and are just constantly inundated by Whale Facts and Whale Opinions, it settles more into what kind of book it actually is, and then I can vibe with it.
The thing about this book is that it is....hm. Expansive. In all ways. Its sentences are expansive, its vocabulary is expansive, its overall length is expansive (obviously), and it expands every moment it can into further ruminating about whales; and the whales it discusses are also, of course, expansive.
I think it's mirroring what the author sees as the monumental nature of whales, thus creating a book as monumental as its subject. And you know what, I think it kind of works! It's weird; it's a deeply weird book, not quite like any other book I've read, but once you get into the right mindset and allow the Discourse Upon Whales to flow over you, I think it really does do a great job of capturing the feel it's going for.
One aspect of this is that the characters within the book don't ever feel quite like specific individual people to me, but more like representatives of archetypes, to allow them to better fit into the monumental nature of the work. This isn't what I usually am interested in in character-work, but again, it works for what this book is doing.
There are plenty of specifics one can discuss about the book (Ishmael/Queequeg: GAY. Melville's whale facts: not always actually factual. Captain Ahab: really bad at being a captain. etc.) but what I was most strongly left with when I finished the book wasn't any of the details of the book, but the overall vibe.
Though I was also surprised by how much the reading of this book made me actually feel so agonizingly bad for all these murdered whales, given that the book is, overall, firmly pro-whaling.
Anyway. I doubt I am likely to reread the book again in the future, but I AM glad I gave it a go! Definitely an interesting piece of literature.
I was pretty dubious by about 150 pages in; I was just finding myself so bored! But I figured I would at least wait it out until the book actually took us to sea, because that might change things.
And it did!
It turns out that the key is that the first 150 pages seem like they're trying to be an ordinary sort of narrative but are just bad at that, but by the time you get to sea and are just constantly inundated by Whale Facts and Whale Opinions, it settles more into what kind of book it actually is, and then I can vibe with it.
The thing about this book is that it is....hm. Expansive. In all ways. Its sentences are expansive, its vocabulary is expansive, its overall length is expansive (obviously), and it expands every moment it can into further ruminating about whales; and the whales it discusses are also, of course, expansive.
I think it's mirroring what the author sees as the monumental nature of whales, thus creating a book as monumental as its subject. And you know what, I think it kind of works! It's weird; it's a deeply weird book, not quite like any other book I've read, but once you get into the right mindset and allow the Discourse Upon Whales to flow over you, I think it really does do a great job of capturing the feel it's going for.
One aspect of this is that the characters within the book don't ever feel quite like specific individual people to me, but more like representatives of archetypes, to allow them to better fit into the monumental nature of the work. This isn't what I usually am interested in in character-work, but again, it works for what this book is doing.
There are plenty of specifics one can discuss about the book (Ishmael/Queequeg: GAY. Melville's whale facts: not always actually factual. Captain Ahab: really bad at being a captain. etc.) but what I was most strongly left with when I finished the book wasn't any of the details of the book, but the overall vibe.
Though I was also surprised by how much the reading of this book made me actually feel so agonizingly bad for all these murdered whales, given that the book is, overall, firmly pro-whaling.
Anyway. I doubt I am likely to reread the book again in the future, but I AM glad I gave it a go! Definitely an interesting piece of literature.
