Anna Karenina: The Official Haiku Review

Finally! After three renewals, six weeks, and 850-plus pages, I have managed to finish reading Tolstoy's classic Anna Karenina. It didn't take so long because I thought it was boring; it took so long because I've been very very busy. Anyway, let's get to the haiku review:

Poor Anna; she found
passion, but could have used more
mundane happiness

As the title suggests, Anna Karenina is a main focus of the novel; but the first sentence hints that she is only part of a wider story: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Besides Anna's family, which includes her boring, passionless husband and her son, there is the family of her brother Stiva, a spendthrift who cheats on his wife Dolly; Dolly's sister Kitty, who rejects the honest earnestness of Levin for the pretty face of Count Vronsky; Levin the farmer and his tubercular brother; and Vronsky and his class-conscious mother. When Anna meets Vronsky and they fall into passionate, obsessive love, it sets in motion several plot threads that end in both happiness and despair.

Anna's story is the tragic one; she finds real love and passion with Vronsky, but can never be satisfied after consummating the relationship. She becomes pregnant, the affair becomes public, and she must choose between giving up her son or giving up her lover. She chooses the former, but cannot feel at ease: she misses her son, and cannot bond with her new daughter because of it; she cannot marry Vronsky because her husband will not give her a divorce; she cannot go out in public because she has been made a pariah; and as a result she cannot stop worrying that Vronsky will abandon her and she will be left with nothing. Her anxieties eat at her, poison her relationship with Vronsky, and ultimately lead to her destruction.

This is all set in contrast with Levin's journey, and I would argue that Levin is really the main character of the novel, with Anna serving mostly as contrast and object lesson. Levin is of the nobility, but makes his living farming and is always seeking ways to improve things—not just for his own profit, but for those who work for them. He is a man of deep and sometimes contrary thoughts, which we see laid out in great detail as he considers farming, Russian politics, religion, and love. After Vronsky's affair with Anna, Kitty reconsiders Levin's suit and eventually marries him. This brings Levin great joy and great pain, as he must fight his jealous impulses and learn to be a good husband. In the eighth and final part of the book (in which Anna does not appear, as she met her end in Part Seven), we see Levin enjoying the mundane happiness of family life, appreciating his new son, and discovering his faith. Levin seems to be a stand-in for Tolstoy, who wrote about religious struggles of his own, and it's hard not find Levin the book's hero as he concludes that his discovery of faith may not change his character, but now "my whole life, regardles of all that may happen to me, every minute of it, is not only not meaningless, as it was before, but has the unquestionable meaning of the good which it is in my power to put into it!"

One last note on Anna Karenina: yes, it's very long. Yes, it's filled with details about farming, Russian politics, social movements, and religious musings. But unlike Melville in Moby Dick, Tolstoy knows how to make these interesting. We consider all these topics through the eyes and mind of Levin, who is continually struggling to make sense of the world. Where Melville's narrator gives us endless lists about whale parts, Tolstoy's Levin considers what new farming techniques mean to him as a landowner, an employer, even a human being. Anna Karenina has the quality of good historical fiction, where the details transport us into another world and another life, rather than bore us into a stupor.

So, you might have noticed it's now the fall. So much for my good intentions of reading lots of foreign-language classics for this summer's Remedial Lit Project. All those French classics will have to wait until next summer. I'm going to take a few weeks to read just for fun (I've also spent the last six weeks reading biographies for work), and then I'll bring back Janespotting. The library just ordered a copy of Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters (!), and then I think I'm moving on to Northanger Abbey and its offspring.

Faust Part One: The Official Haiku Review

While considering what European classic to choose next for my Remedial Lit Project, I knew I should find something by the German polymath* Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), a philosopher, scientist, poet, dramatist, and novelist. He is one of the foremost figures in German literature, and with his drama Faust he influenced many writers, artists, even composers. The Faust legend, of a man selling his soul to the devil for magical knowledge, is older than Goethe; I read the version by Shakespeare's contemporary Christopher Marlowe in college. But Goethe's reworking reflects a more modern concern with earthly knowledge, making it quite appealing for a modern age where science was becoming more and more prominent.

Goethe's Faust was published in two parts; the first in 1808 (although a fragment appeared in 1790), and the second after his death in 1832, as part of his collected works. Because that's how it was published, and that's how I got it from the library, that's how I will review it. So here's my reaction to part 1:

Faust seeks highest truths
But Satan tempts him with love
This doesn't end well

As I mentioned before, this version of Faust is a character obsessed with knowledge and learning the ultimate truths of the universe, not with wealth or power or the usual earthly temptations. He is despairing of ever learning enough to satisfy him and considers suicide before Easter bells recall him to himself. Enter Mephistopheles (aka Satan aka the Devil), who offers a deal: he will assist Faust in any way to achieve ultimate knowledge, and in turn Faust will give him his soul when he finds himself perfectly satisfied in his life. Faust takes that bet, believing that he will never be so pleased that he doesn't want to learn more.

Notice another difference from the original legend that makes Faust more sympathetic: not only is Faust searching for knowledge (not pleasure), he doesn't make a deal, he enters into a wager. But here's where it gets weird. Does the devil tempt him with the promise of discovery and knowledge? No; after a weird interlude teasing some hapless drunks, he takes Faust to a witch, gets him all rejuvenated, and has him fall in love with a maiden named both Margaret and Gretchen. (Thank goodness for footnotes, or I would have been lost.) Faust immediately forgets all else besides closing the deal with Gretchen, eventually leaving her pregnant and accidentally poisoning her mother and stabbing her brother to death. He runs away, seemingly forgetting the girl who used to be the point of all his thoughts, until after a strange Walpurgis night party with all sorts of political satire, Faust finally remembers the poor girl, who is now languishing in a prison after drowning Faust's bastard infant. Faust tries to escape with her, but she's too crazy and the play ends with a voice from heaven proclaiming she is saved.

Whew. That's one wacky, weird ending, and it definitely seems like a work that was written over the course of many years, there are so many differing threads in it. I will admit, however, that the language this scientist uses to describe everything around him is very poetic. This particular translation, by Peter Salm, eschews copying the rhyme scheme in favor of reproducing the "sense and spirit" of the text. It still felt poetical, though, with rich language and good rhythms that I enjoyed as I tried to make sense of the story. All in all, strange but interesting. We'll see how Part Two stacks up; Goethe spent even more time writing that part, so I'm anticipating all sorts of weird bits in that one.

*polymath="somebody with knowledge of many subjects." I love this word, but now I have to think of a different one for my "P" Word Nerd feature.

The Little Prince: The Official Haiku Review

I was going to try to read my list of foreign-language classics in chronological order (it seemed to make as much sense as anything else), but my fellow library patrons wouldn't cooperate. So after finishing the dense, poetic Inferno of Dante, I turned to this short little children's novel by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. I've seen it on bookstore shelves all my life, and with more than 80 million copies in print, it's likely the most famous foreign-language work for children ever published. (If there's another candidate, by all means let me know.) So by reading this 1943 work, I'm getting two birds with one stone, so to speak. (Or at least crossing it off a future Remedial Children's Lit Project list.) In any case, here's the review:

Time spent with others
Tames your heart. Awwwwwwww, that prince is
Too twee* to stay here.

Obviously, many many people are fond of this book, in which the narrator tells of being forced to land his airplane in the desert and then meeting the Little Prince there. The LP, being from another planet (really, an asteroid), tells the narrator of his travels and what he has learned. His lessons mainly have to do with learning to see with the heart, and finding value in things and people you love. There is a single rose on his asteroid, and many on earth, but he realizes "it is the time you have spent with your rose that makes your rose so important." Having imparted his wisdom to the narrator, he leaves, telling his friend not to be sad, "because there is nothing sad about old shells."

Sweet sentiments, yes. But by the time I'd finished the book (and it didn't take long, it is very brief), I was ready to gag on the sweetness. Maybe that's being a bit imprecise; I'll try to explain it better. The first thing I found irritating was the continual references to how grownups don't get it, you can't explain things to grownups, they're beyond help, blah blah blah. I don't think it's because I myself am now a grownup who just doesn't understand things; I've read other books that state this sentiment without getting annoyed. But in those cases, the little asides about how children understand the world better than grownups felt like a secret the author was sharing with me. In this book, after about the fifth or sixth reference, it no longer felt like a secret; it felt more like pandering, or like that really eccentric teacher who thinks she's "with it" but the kids all think she's weird. (In other words, more like how Boy sees me at this point: over-the-hill and uncognizant of the fact. Twerp. But I digress.)

The other thing that I found irritating about the book wasn't the sweet theme itself; the story of the fox about how being tamed involves two creatures changing, that was sweet. Having it repeated about ten times with the subtlety of a sledgehammer? Not so much. For a short book, it didn't take long for me to feel like the author was really saying: "Hey! [WHACK!] Appreciate your friends! [WHACK!] Do I have your attention? [WHACK!] Friends are special! [WHACK!] Treasure your experiences! [WHACK!] Are you sure you're paying attention? [WHACK! WHACK!] Love is what it's all about!"

So maybe I'm just a cynical old grownup who sees a hat instead of a snake eating an elephant ... but I think that had I read this at age nine, I would have been a cynical young reader who wanted more story, less moral. C'est la vie, no?

*twee=a Britishism meaning "affectedly or excessively [ie annoyingly] cute"

The Inferno: The Official Haiku* Review

*I lie, it's actually terza rima, but that title doesn't scan as well.

This summer I decided to resume my Remedial Lit Project by covering those classic authors of Western literature who didn't write in English. Sure, I hit Homer and Aeschylus and all those Greeks back in my college Great Books class, and I had great British literature coming out of my ears, but unless they were written in Spanish I didn't get much in the way of foreign-language classics. So last year, after boning up on American classics, I decided I really needed to broaden my basics.

First up is The Inferno by Dante Aligheri (1265-1321), the Italian poet considered one of the founders of Italian literature. His Divine Comedy, of which The Inferno is the first part, is considered one of the world's greatest epic poems. As you can probably tell from the title, The Inferno is Dante's portrait of hell, told via 34 cantos (aka chapters) of terza rima stanzas. (Terza rima=three-line stanzas, rhyme pattern aba / bcb / cdc / ded / efe / fgf / and so on and so on.) In tribute to the original verse, I offer my review in this poetic format:

So Dante takes a little tour of Hell
Sees devils, sinners, and the river Styx
Escapes above to Italy to tell

Of beasts and images that would transfix
The reader, were he not compelled to add
A ton of old Venetian politics.

So all in all, I'd say it's not half bad.

Even if you've never read Dante, you're probably familiar with some of the concepts he elaborates: the virtuous heathens of Limbo (including his guide, the Roman poet Virgil); the gluttons wading in a river of waste; the suicides transformed into thorny trees; the false prophets walking around with their heads on backwards. The torments he concocts for the many different kinds of sinners are both inventive and appropriate. It would be a very fascinating exploration of human sin, except almost all his examples were contemporary figures from his home city of Florence, from which he was exiled in his mid-thirties. I was forced to continually refer to the detailed notes, to figure out whether Ugolino was a Guelph or a Ghibelline, and if the former, whether he was a Black or White Guelph, and whether he was loyal or a turncoat, and ... you get the idea. It was a weird combination of familiar Greek mythology and alien Italian politics, and it was just hard to wrap my head around it.

Of course, I didn't read this in the original Italian. I was lucky enough to stumble upon the 2002 translation by the Irish poet Ciaran Carson, who not only reproduces the rhythm of the original (an approximation of iambic pentameter, the old "la-DAH la-DAH la-DAH la-DAH la-DAH"), he also gets the rhyme. This may mean that his translation is a bit loose in some places, but the sounds! Check out the beginning of Canto III, when Dante is reading the engraving above the portal to Hell:

"Through me, into the city full of woe
through me, the message of eternal pain;
through me, the passage where the lost souls go.

Justice moved my Maker in his high domain
Power Divine and Primal Love built me;
and Supreme Wisdom; I will aye remain.

Before me there was nothing made to be,
except eternity; eternal I shall endure;
all hope abandon, ye who go through me."

Zowie. The whole thing is full of similar instances of beautiful wordsmithing—and it's not all as high-falutin' as the above example, there are also some wonderfully earthy lines as well. If you're of a mind to check out Dante, I highly recommend this version.

The return of the Remedial Lit Project

Or, I might say, the retour, vuelta, ritorna, Rückkehr*, or возвращение of the Remedial Lit Project. Summer is coming, and I promised I would return to my list of books I should have read in school and check off a few more. And as you might guess from the first sentence, my theme for this summer is works in languages other than English: those classics that are so classic that we read them even in translation.

Now, I have to say that in one aspect, my record of foreign-language classics is better than average. As a Spanish major I read Don Quijote in the original (both volumes!), and I've read most of the major Latin American authors. But aside from them, and tackling Crime and Punishment in high school, I can't recall reading any other foreign classics. Tolstoy? I wrote a 10,000 word bio on him, but haven't read his work. Victor Hugo? I didn't even see the Disney version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Goethe? I know how to pronounce his name, but can't think of the title of any of his books.

This is where you come in. I'm going to start with Dante's Inferno, but after that I'm not sure where to go next. I need your suggestions: what classic translations should I put on my summer reading list? Right now I'm going to limit it to Europe, because I'll probably only have time for half a dozen works or so, and I'm sure I can fill my list without leaving the West. So give me your fresh, your filling, your huddled words yearning to be read, and we'll see what kind of list I can come up with.

*I'm sure TSU will correct me as to the correct German word for return, but it's not my fault; the Google translator had over twenty German words for return, so I just chose the first one. It seemed less likely to be one of those horribly specific compound nouns they like to confuse you with.

Walden: The Official Haiku Review

I must make a confession: I couldn't finish Thoreau's Walden. I know it epitomizes the American Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century, with its emphasis on self-reliance and individual spirituality. I know it's a classic, important work that influenced not only many writers, but future environmentalists. I know I really should finish this book; I chose it as my last selection for my summer Remedial Lit Project (pre-WWI American) because I looked at a list of writers I'd never read and Thoreau was the most glaring omission.

I also know that if I had a time machine and could meet Thoreau, I would likely find him an insufferable git. So here is my Official Haiku Review of the first third of Thoreau's Walden:

Do you own your stuff,
Or does it own you? You fool!
Go away. You suck.

I can't say I disagree with Thoreau's premises about consumerism, self-reliance, and the value of nature. (If he thought mid-19th century America was shallow and obsessed with possessions, I can only imagine how appalling he would find modern culture.) He has some valuable observations about what's really important in life, and some really poetic descriptions of his little shack in the woods by Walden Pond. Unfortunately, the overall tone of the work can only be described as smug. Now, I managed to plod through dozens of chapters on whales in Moby Dick, and wade through intelligible dialogue in The Pioneers, and I was willing to do so for the sake of a story. It wasn't always a great story, but I wanted to know how things would turn out.

However, I'm not going to sit still and be harangued at by a misanthropic hermit just for some pretty descriptions of nature. I'd rather sit out in a hammock and enjoy it firsthand, preferably while reading something that's meaningful and entertaining. So I'm taking my one pass for the summer and stopping early. I'm also stopping my Remedial Lit Project until next summer, when I will try to get to many of those foreign authors I never read. Don't despair, however; the Haiku Review will return next month as I begin my Remedial Film Classics Project.

O Pioneers!: The Official Haiku Review

It's amazing the difference one word (and ninety years) can make. It took me three weeks and much toil to get through James Fenimore Cooper's 1823 novel The Pioneers. It took me less than two days to devour Willa Cather's 1913 novel O Pioneers! So without further ado (or complaint), here is my official Haiku Review:

For her, the land is
work, love, grief, poetry, self
Land is life; life, land.

Cather's short novel follows one woman over twenty years as she tries to make a success of her family's Nebraska farm. Sounds terribly exciting, right? But listen to how Cather turns the prairie into poetry:

One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away. A mist of fine snowflakes was curling and eddying about the cluster of low drab building huddles on the gray prairie, under a gray sky. The dwelling-houses were set about haphazard on the tough prairie sod; some of them looked as if they had been moved in overnight, and others as if they were straying off by themselves, headed straight for the open plain.

Of course, it doesn't hurt that after this opening description Cather soon recounts the story of a kitten being rescued (awwwww!), but she punctuates her entire story with similar examples of beautiful writing. Her main character, Alexandra Bergson, isn't stunningly beautiful or spunky or clever; she seems an ordinary farmgirl, albeit one with dedication, determination, and a willingness to take risks. Despite her older brothers' hesitance to adopt newfangled techniques, Alexandra brings prosperity to her farm through canny management. It allows her younger brother to go to college and leave Alexandra and the land behind. There seems to be no room for adventure or grand passions in her life, but she sees that such passions can bring tragedy. In the end, she has love and her farm (although her older brothers attempt to take it from her—bad men, grrr!), and the simple life suits her: "We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it—for a little while."

Beyond the pure beauty of her words, Cather's talent is to portray the essence of her subjects in just a few scenes. The novel is less than 200 pages long, but I felt I learned more about her characters and their Nebraska farmlands than I did from Cooper's 450 pages. After finishing I immediately wanted to hit the library and find Cather's other books. Of course, they will have to wait for the end of the summer, after I read a couple more American classics. But it does make me wonder what other marvels I have missed.

The Pioneers: The Official Haiku Review

As I mentioned a week or so ago, I'd been having trouble making my way through the overgrown forest that is James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers. It's really not my fault; even the great Mark Twain opined that Cooper broke several literary rules, explaining: "I feel sure, deep down in my heart, that Cooper wrote about the poorest English that exists in our language, and that the English of Deerslayer is the very worst that even Cooper ever wrote." I guess I should be glad I picked The Pioneers to read instead of The Deerslayer. And I did finish it, despite the struggle. So here is my Official Haiku Review:

Earth and her bounty
Are not a way to keep score
We should be stewards

The Pioneers was the first of the Leatherstocking Tales to be written, but it falls last chronologically. It is set in 1793 in upstate New York, lately civilized by men such as local judge Marmaduke Temple (Cooper has some great names, at least). The new roads and towns and laws are making life difficult for the elderly Natty Bumppo (aka the Leatherstocking, aka the Deerslayer), who lives off the land much as the dwindling Native American population used to. The book opens with Bumppo and Temple arguing over which one of them shot a deer (and thus owns the carcass). This argument lasts a long time—they and other characters rehash it several times, much to my intense boredom—but it is representative of a larger problem: who owns the land and its resources? Bumppo used to hunt and fish at will; now Temple insists he observe a hunting season. This leads to a confrontation that enlivens the last 100 pages of the book. (Why is it only the last 100 pages? sigh.)

Ironically, while Temple tries to control the land and restrict Bumppo's hunting, he agrees with the old hunter when it comes to the wasteful ways of other townspeople. Instead of catching only the fish they need to eat, the locals use nets to trap the biggest fish, leaving the smaller ones to go to waste. When a pigeon migration flies overhead, the locals see it as sport, shooting as many as they can and leaving most of the meat to rot. Temple even worries that the trees may be overharvested. Of course, Temple's concern isn't purely out of love of nature; he is biggest landowner in the county, and depleted lands could lose their value.

Interestingly enough, there is a romance in the novel that almost exactly parallels the one in The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne's classic that I read last month. Of course, the novel's resolution favors white landowners like Temple; it's no great spoiler to tell you that the two characters who are closest to the land end up either die or move west at the close of the novel. Maybe Cooper thought this was progress, or Manifest Destiny; maybe he thought it was a tragedy. (He published the novel in 1823, less than a decade before the Trail of Tears forced the relocation of most of the South's Native Americans to the west of the Mississippi.) I can't really tell; either the author is too subtle for my poor understanding, or else Twain was right:

A work of art? It has no invention; it has no order, system, sequence, or result; it has no lifelikeness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality; its characters are confusedly drawn, and by their acts and words they prove that they are not the sort of people the author claims that they are; its humor is pathetic; its pathos is funny; its conversations are–oh! indescribable; its love-scenes odious; its English a crime against the language. Counting these out, what is left is Art. I think we must all admit that.

American Lit 2, Poor Me 1

So I've been following the lead of my friend Jacqui in her Remedial Literature Project, trying to get caught up on some of those American authors and novels I somehow missed when I was farting around playing Lode Runner immersed in British and Latin American Lit in college. I'm not nearly as ambitious as Jacqui, trying to read one book a week; I've got other important things to read, like the latest for my children's book club (checking out the competition) and Entertainment Weekly's New Classics! the newspapers and newsweeklies I need to keep up on local elections and various important events in the world.

So if you've been following my blog, you'll know so far I liked Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables, while Meville's Moby Dick totally kicked my ass. So I turned to James Fenimore Cooper, author of the classic Leatherstocking Tales, to break the tie. The Pioneers (1823) is the first and most realistic of the Tales, and made Cooper an international success. One critic called it his masterpiece. As a bonus, I was pretty sure there weren't going to be any chapters on whale heads.

I'm sad to report, however, that for me, reading The Pioneers is like undergoing "advanced interrogation techniques" at Gitmo. It may not technically be torture, but it sure feels like it. I'm a third of a way through the book, and so far Judge Marmaduke Temple has shot and grazed a young woodsman while trying to hit a deer. Then he argued with Natty Bumppo (aka Leatherstocking) about whether the deer was his or not. Then they took the young woodsman home to treat his minor wounds while they argued some more. Then they went to church. Then they went to the pub, where they argued about both the sermon and the deer. It's like Cooper decided to avoid breaking the classic literary rule of "Show, don't tell" by both showing and telling. (And I hate to break it to you, but having people sit around discussing what just happened counts as "telling," even if it is dialogue.)

That might not be so bad if he didn't break another rule regarding dialogue, namely, MAKE IT READABLE. Let's say you have a character who you want to portray as "uneducated." Ya cud do it by makin' everythin' he says drop a 'postrophe in ever' friggin' word, until yer reader feels like 'e is drownin' in 'postrophes. Or you could throw in a few choice words like "reckon" and "yonder" and the reader will supply the right voice.

Now, I understand that Cooper is trying to portray the diversity of the New York frontier. (It is set in 1793, back when New York state was the frontier.) There are immigrants from all over: a German major, a French gentleman, and an Irish barmaid, not to mention an African-American slave and the Native American John Mohegan. And Cooper had the right idea with the Monsieur, who speaks half in French, half in legible English. But then I had to endure the following within the space of two pages:

German major: "Ter teer is not so plenty as in ter old war, Pumppo; put ter lant is not mate as for ter teer to live on, put for Christians." Holy crap. At least I had the clue they were already talking about deer (teer), but mate for made? Put for But? Someone get me an aspirin.

Irish barmaid: "It's varry pratty men is the French; and jist when I stopt the cart, ... to kape the rig'lers in, a rigiment of the jontlemen marched by." I guess she's saying something nice about French soldiers, but exactly what is beyond me. If I have to stop to decipher what your characters are saying, I'm not reading anymore, I'm translating. And that's work.

Stubborn person that I am, I do plan on finishing The Pioneers. I'm pretty sure I know one of the major themes—who owns the land's bounty—and I think there might be a romance hidden among all the discussion about the deer. Here's hoping it's not so much more work to uncover it.

The House of the Seven Gables: The Official Haiku Review

After struggling through Moby Dick's 700 whale-detail-filled pages, it was a pleasant change of pace to open up Nathaniel Hawthorne's 300-page romance. (Strangely enough, it was published the same year, 1851, as Melville's epic, which he dedicated to Hawthorne "in token of my admiration for his genius.") So here is my Official Haiku Review:

Aristocracy
Suits not the New World's temper
Love is the best wealth

Granted, there were some places where Hawthorne's prose approached the lavender, if not downright purple. But this story, which on the surface is about a New England family cursed by an ancestor's greedy land grab, really explores the American temperament of the mid-1800s. Were we to be a country where family wealth or prestige (for good or ill) predetermined the course of our lives? Or were we to truly embrace the brave American experiment, where "all men are created equal" and an individual could achieve his own destiny through hard work and determination? It is clear where Hawthorne stands on the matter. That he explores these questions through a story which involves mystery and romance made it all the more fun to read. It may not be a grand epic, but I'm glad I included it in my summer Remedial Lit Project. I think next I shall tackle another American writer I overlooked, JF Cooper, and see if he breaks the tie.

Moby Dick: The Official Haiku Review

Finally. Two weeks after this post about how I was floundering around in Moby Dick, I have finished reading! And here is my official Remedial Lit Project Haiku Review of Melville's masterpiece:

Melville and Ahab
Both obsessed with great sperm whales
In deadly detail.

Now, in fairness, I can see why this novel has the reputation of an American classic. The last 100 pages are splendid. Some lovely descriptions, a sense of foreboding and passion driving the plot, great action, a tragic conclusion. (Whoops. I hope I didn't spoil the ending for you. You were thinking Ahab and Moby made up their differences and sailed off into the sunset together, right?) And the first 100 pages were pretty entertaining, too, as Melville introduced some interesting characters and how they find themselves enlisted in the Pequod's doomed voyage.

However, I can also see how easy it would be to make one of those "Abridged Illustrated Classics" out of the novel. Simply cut out the many, many chapters with such scintillating titles: "Cetology"; "Monstrous Pictures of Whales"; "Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales"; "Of Whales in Paint, in Teeth, etc." (those last three were consecutive, ye gods!); "The Whale as a Dish"; "The Sperm Whale's Head"; "The Right Whale's Head"; "The Tail," and so on, and so on, and so on and on and on. Now, as I wrote before, I can understand the need for some of this detail. Melville's contemporaries truly would have had no idea what whales were like--the immensity and scale of them, the hard work of harvesting them (shudder), the dangers of life at sea. And at times Melville writes compellingly on these subjects. But too many times the details aren't so compelling--they're overwhelming. It's like the college lecturer who drones on and on for an hour, only to get to the really interesting and important stuff in the last ten minutes of class.

Still, through perseverance and pure stubbornness, I managed to finish. I can now say, Yes! I barely survived have read Moby Dick!

Now onto Hawthorne, to whom Meville dedicated MD, "in token of my admiration for his genius." Let's hope he didn't inspire that dogged devotion to detail.

Floundering around in Moby *expletive deleted*

So, inspired again by my pal Jacqui, I decided to participate in her summer remedial literature project. After all, despite the numerous classic novels I read during my college days--and sometimes on my own, just to feel virtuous--there are a quite a few gaps in my education. (Especially in American lit, due to the particular bias of my degree program.) Anyway, Melville's "Moby Dick" suggested itself pretty quickly. First of all, everyone seemed to have avoided reading that one, although everyone knows it's about a big white whale. And hey, they quoted it in "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan," and that was a pretty cool movie. If it inspired an upper-division Trek flick, how boring could it be?

Oh. My. Lord.

Now, one thing I will grant MD is that the chapters are short. Sometimes very short--less than a page. So I'm feeling like I'm making progress, because I'm on chapter 48 (out of 135), even though I've only been reading bits here and there. Unfortunately, I'm on chapter 48 and they've only been at sea a couple of days. I thought this book was about chasing a white whale, so what gives? The character sketches have been pretty interesting, but why the 10-page chapters classifying different kinds of whales, and talking about whales through history, and recounting tales of whales attacking ships? It seems like Ahab is not the only one obsessed with whales, I thought to myself.

Then I really thought about the why behind all this seemingly dull information. When Melville was writing, his audience had no real idea what whales looked like. There was no Discovery Channel HD to show us whales in all their glory, both above and below the water. There was no Sea World so that landlubbers could see Shamu in action. The best any of his readers might do, assuming they weren't whalers themselves, was to catch a glimpse of a fin at a distance off shore, or in rare cases see a beached or butchered specimen. So the idea of a whale as large as a ship, one that could attack people and destroy boats, must have seemed pretty fantastic. For Melville's contemporaries, reading about the different types of whales and their capabilities might have been as captivating as reading about hippogriffs, phoenixes, and spells in the latest Harry Potter is for us.

So, a couple of lessons for me in this observation. The first is to have a little patience with ol' Moby, and try to see the sense of wonder that Melville was trying to create with these descriptions. (It wasn't like I was going to quit the book without finishing, I can be particularly stubborn when it comes to books. And maybe the best part is at the end.)

The second lesson applies to my own writing, especially fantasy: I may have lots of details to share with you about this world I've created, but don't spend ten *expletive deleted* pages on mere details!