We have no idea how we missed this one. Columnist David Allen at the Daily Bulletin has been blogging occasionally about reading Melville's Moby-Dick. We started following his slow, steady progress back in February.
Earlier this month, Allen finished his read and promised he'd have a column about his impressions of the novel. Well, it somehow slipped in under our radar on April 5th, but we're now pleased to pass on a belated link to Allen's book review in which, taken under the author's spell, as often happens to readers in the presence great writing, Allen waxes poetic:
Thing is, though, I loved "Moby-Dick." Exasperating as the book could be at times, the writing is lyrical, the tone reflective. A few sample lines:
"Top-heavy was the ship as a dinnerless student with all Aristotle in his head."
Ahab, depressed: "But do I look very old, so very, very old, Starbuck? I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise."
Moby, breaching: "So suddenly seen in the blue plain of the sea, and relieved against the still bluer margin of the sky, the spray that he raised ... glittered and glared like a glacier ..."
There are hundreds of lines like these, startling in their beauty or their humor. Melville touches on history, science, sociology, philosophy and religion as he inflates what could have been a simple adventure story with myth and significance.
My favorite chapter may be the one devoted to a whale's forehead, in which Melville rhapsodizes about its absence of a nose. This didn't advance the plot, but it was an amazing read.
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