Moby-Dick or, The Whale (Penguin Classics)

Moby Dick by Herman Melville, accompanied by King Lear by W. Shakespeare and the Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag, was a monthly reading for a book club. Obviously, Moby Dick was the centerpiece of the dining, with its sheer volume compared to the others, and a myriad of topics it unraveled. Chapter 96, the Try-Works was one of the most intense chapters. While describing oil-extraction operation from sperm, Ismael observed that "Like a plethoric burning martyr, or a self-consuming misanthrope, once ignited, the whale supplies his own fuel and burns by his own body", which reminded me the "Seven Steps Verse or Quatrain of Seven Steps 七步詩 allegedly ciphered by 曹植, Cao Zhi, i.e., "People burn the beanstalk to boil beans, / The beans in the pot cry out. / We are born of the selfsame root, / Why should we hound each other to death with such impatience?" Ismael also ascertained that "the truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows (Isaiah 53), ..., and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. "All is vanity." ALL.", which followed "But that night, in particular, a strange (and ever since inexplicable) thing occurred to me... Uppermost was the impression, that whatever swift, rushing thing I stood on was not so much bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern. A stark, bewildered feeling, as of DEATH, came over me." Alas, Ahab should have heeded that.Shakespearean influences can be found everywhere in the book. As can be noted, the Parsee's self-fulfilling prophecies sounded like those weird ones by the witches in Macbeth. Another interesting part of the book was Chapter 54, The Town-Ho's Story, which seemed to be the most absorbing chapter. As a story within a story; or another layer of stories under such stories, probably this chapter may have many twists, tricks, and/or plots for this specific story. That is, I doubted that such an arguably good one happened to become the head of a mutiny, I held that he was meant to be the one who led such mutiny, a rebellious one in his nature. How about the bad guy who happened to trigger the feud led to the mutiny? He probably was a bad one, but it would be absurd to move the whole burden of such mutiny to an insolent one, not onto the desperado.When I told one of my senior friends during mountain tracking last month that I was reading the Moby Dick, he suggested that the book should be read as a good business novel. He observed that the characters could be better understood if we put the characters and situations in the book into a corporate setting or business context. Indeed the book itself is about crews in whaling business - risky, profitable, and overly-exploited -, hence business perspectives underlying in the story. How about the intense politics by and between Ahab and Starbuck? Ahab seemed to be worried about the possibility of a mutiny led by Starbuck should he had gone too far. In Chapter 109, Ahab showed his unexpected self-restraint when he was confronted with Starbuck about how to deal with leaking barrels. At the end of the day, he was just an executive hired by principal owners, i.e. Captain Bildad and Captain Peleg, of the ship. How about Captain Ahab's elite whaling troupe, led by the Parsee? We have seen secret elite groups or standing task forces within large corporations. Even their phone numbers are not listed on the company directory, those groups do jobs directly mandated by the highest executives behind the scene. Having gained confidence after a series of tugs-of-war with Starbuck and his crews, or just out of nervous impatience, Ahab went all out, with Pip as his sidekick. As Ahab seized initiatives, Starbuck yielded to Ahab's authority. Chapter 132 was the most hilarious one: As Ahab exhibited a kind of "When I was young" tirade, or "Latte is Horse..", a pun in Korean, Starbuck just came down to give Ahab flattery: "Oh, my captain! my Captain! noble soul! grand old heart, after all!" Although he knew what would come to him and his crew, he just followed his Fate, not stood against her, which is common in failling corporations.

You can't beat the price for this very nice hardcover book. The only downside of the book is the print; its way to small.

Excellent book and seller! The item arrived early and was in the very best condition! Highly recommend both the book and the seller!

I felt a kind of necessity to read this book because of it being a classic and a required text for academic classes of American literature. I thought there were some exceptional scenes from the book and the brooding monologues had a kind of Shakespearean quality, which made them the best parts of the book. The extended studies of whales and whaling took some work to wade through but with the grim descriptions of how whales are processed made me think, no wonder Moby Dick was vengeful as Ahab in the three attacks on him and finally the ship. I also found interesting the parallels between Ahab and Moby Dick. The conflict was complex by both of their psychologies. Who really was the Leviathan? There was a discussion almost glossed about the whale population of that time, and it became an underlying issue and reared its head occasionally. The graphic explanations of processing the carcass, the value of the whale's body make the book quite relevant to today. I almost want to ask where are the Moby Dicks of today fighting back. This brings up another question: Who is the hero? I'm not sure Melville was too interested in answering these questions; just raise them and that intention is more provocative and intriguing to me.

If you like your fiction turbid and flowery, by all means read Herman Melville’s novel, "Moby Dick". So verbose is this book that it took me forty years to finish! I began it as an undergraduate but quickly succumbed to boredom. The often opaque prose combined with explanatory detours (e.g., a lengthy and irrelevant review of all manner of cetaceans) killed all interest. Twenty years or so later I gave it another honest attempt. Again, albeit reading further than I did initially, I still floundered on the rock of unchained verbosity. After this failure I could not shake a solitary and pestering thought: How in the heck did this whale of a tale end? Finally, in 2021, I gathered all that current technology offers, including the book audio recording and a Kindle to follow the audio by reading along. Alas, success at last! So was the novel worth my four decade labor? Character development is poor; only Ahab, Ishmael, and Queequeg receive the author’s attention to any great degree. The plot is riddled with many of the aforementioned detours, mostly regarding whale physiology and descriptions of various types of whales. (Note: Most astonishing in regard to Moby Dick the whale is Meville’s refusal to recognize a mammal when he sees one—-he erroneously uses the term “fish '' to describe all cetaceans., even though he knows that Linnaeus categorized them as mammals, that said whales are warm blooded and the females secrete milk for their young. ) In short, a hundred pages could easily be excised without loss of the plot or its meaning. Identifying a protagonist is equally laborious. It could be the aforementioned characters or "Moby Dick" himself. Ahab is no hero though; he risks the lives of his crew to seek personal vengeance on the whale who chomped off his leg on a previous voyage. Alternatively, Moby Dick could be considered the hero. He did not ask Ahab to cruise the high seas in search of sperm whales for lamp oil. A wild animal will demonstrate the “fight or flee” instinct every time it is threatened. It is difficult to blame the “fish” when he fights back against those who would kill and flay him. Thus, all is muddled in the protagonist identification department. Lest this review seem too negative, Melville does capture the feel of a New England fishing village in the 1850s. He paints a quaint picture here, relating the peculiarities of crew recruitment, Puritan-laced-fire-and-brimstone sermons, and lodging arrangements prior to the discovery of Hiltons and Holiday Inns. Also fascinating is Melville’s explanation of the cost-benefits of whaling. Despite all else, the closing pages do present an exciting climax to the weary reader (I will not spoil the ending. You slog through the novel like I had to!) And yes, whalers did cry “Thar she blows” upon a whale sighting. Finally, it is worth noting that my review was evidently shared in whole or part by Americans at the time of "Moby Dick’s" publication. Melville did not get rich from the novel as it was a commercial failure in the United States (although the British public seemed charmed by it.) Later, in the early twentieth century, various authors waxed over the novel, one going so far as to gush that he wished he had written Moby Dick, while another proclaimed it the greatest of American novels. Why this remarkable critical rebirth of Melville’s opus seventy years later is a mystery worthy of Holmes. One last point. Melville unhesitatingly supplies his readers with every esoteric aspect of whaling the human mind can concoct, yet he omits the answer to the most essential question: Where did the name "Moby Dick” arise? Even Wikipedia remains silent on this vital point. As Ishmael might opine, there is much food for thought in this omission. 2021

book received in excellent condition

細かい記述。広い知識。ゆったりしながら、ハラハラドキドキ。捕鯨船に関わったことのない作者が、どうしてこんなに細かく記述することが出来たのだろう。名著の中の名著と誰もが認めるに違いない。長い小説の中でイラストは重要な役割を果たしている。ちょっとくどいなと思っているときに、このイラストは次に読み進む階段の途中の踊り場の役割を担っている。

I love it......................!

Pages and print could have been better.Yet at this price point it is value for money.This is the epic of AmericaDon't call yourself well read if you haven't read Moby dick

É um bom livro, traz à tona uma experiência e um "engajamento" bastante peculiares. Ao ler a obra de Melville no idioma original, contudo, eu fiquei pensando como as motivações do nosso protagonista talvez assumam diferentes tonalidades, dependendo de algumas traduções para o português: seja na interlocução, na emulação ou até no mimetismo. Moby Dick não foi meu estilo de leitura predileto nos recentes meses, mesmo assim encontrou espaços para me envolver em suas específicas e originais digressões.