[HN Gopher] Original 1851 reviews of Moby-Dick
___________________________________________________________________
Original 1851 reviews of Moby-Dick
Author : thedday
Score : 79 points
Date : 2021-10-21 00:15 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (lithub.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (lithub.com)
| protomyth wrote:
| I think there is a whole generation of college students that have
| a visceral hatred of this book, not because of its quality, but
| because of professors trying to extract more symbolic meaning
| than was intended.
| relaunched wrote:
| The language of the reviews is quizzical. I caught myself
| thinking how high-brow language once was. Then, it dawned on me
| the sense of intentionality and craftsmanship displayed by each
| sentence.
|
| U up? Who dis? :emoji :emoji :emoji
|
| I'm not sure if I'm nostalgic, sad or just a little bit of, "get
| off my lawn."_
| drzaiusapelord wrote:
| If you think they didn't have slang in the 19th century then
| you are mistaken. You can't compare academic writing to slang
| and pretend society has devolved. We live in a time where
| people who would be locked out of the publication process for
| "reasons" can now write books. Where literacy is the highest
| ever. Where more books get published than ever. The incredible
| progress in publishing should be praised, not disingenuously
| mocked.
| avian wrote:
| > We live in a time where people who would be locked out of
| the publication process for "reasons" can now write books.
|
| People could write unpublished books back then just as well,
| and people can be locked out of the publication process
| today. The difference is that "reasons" were given by a
| person and today you're locked out by an Algorithm that
| doesn't even tell you why.
| pkage wrote:
| You're comparing highbrow literature reviews in leading
| magazines to short instant messages, which are a significantly
| different medium designed to be read by one or two people once,
| and then thrown away. Your best comparison is telegram
| style[0], which is not dissimilar to today's texts--complete
| with its own slang and shorthand. Nobody's writing "u up" in
| the New Yorker.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegram_style
| relaunched wrote:
| I can't help but think that telegram style was more a
| function of the exorbitant cost and pricing model of sending
| a telegram.
|
| https://newatlas.com/last-telegraph-
| message/28314/#:~:text=I....
|
| Relative to wages in the 1860s, telegrams were very
| expensive.
|
| https://www.portablepress.com/blog/2016/10/where-the-
| money-w...
| mwcampbell wrote:
| Composing a text message on a touchscreen keyboard has its
| own cost. Not monetary, but still something to minimize.
| yeetaccount wrote:
| More effort was put into expressing meaning when people weren't
| constantly stimulated. There's still meaning today, but I can't
| help but feel it's shallow and unappreciated by reader and
| writer alike.
| fabriceleal wrote:
| I'm a non native english speaker trying to read this book, sort
| of gave it up around (i think) half to read other books in the
| waiting list. Most of the interludes are not that engaging to me
| (whale classification chapter comes to mind), which is a pity
| since I enjoyed the actual narrative.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > Most of the interludes are not that engaging to me (whale
| classification chapter comes to mind),
|
| FWIW, that is the experience of many English speakers; it's a
| feature, not a bug, so to speak.
| zabzonk wrote:
| My review:
|
| A brilliant book, possibly my favourite of all the books I have
| read, which is a lot, and certainly one that I have enjoyed re-
| reading time and again. Tragic that it wasn't more widely
| appreciated in Melville's lifetime. A must read.
| tkgally wrote:
| I agree that it's a brilliant book, but it's also a very
| strange one. Those reviews suggest to me that some of the
| earliest readers did in fact appreciate both aspects of it.
| jimbler wrote:
| Fun to see this on HN. What an incredibly strange, amazing and
| beautiful book. Ambition as wide as the ocean. I think both
| Ishmael and Mellville were nuts. I'm attempting to finish it
| right now (again). I've tried multiple times to get all the way
| through. I've joked that Moby Dick is actually my Moby Dick.
| ghaff wrote:
| While some of the basically factual whaling information is
| fascinating, some of it is also perhaps dealt with by
| skinning.
| yuuu wrote:
| I am skeptical of anyone who has read Moby Dick and not
| admitted how much of a slog it is.
| allturtles wrote:
| Why? Surely you agree that different people have different
| tastes. I couldn't get through the first chapter of Infinite
| Jest, but I don't think people who say they love the book are
| being insincere. There are large numbers of people who would
| find the tech jobs that many people on this site enjoy to be
| incredibly tedious and boring.
| ericmcer wrote:
| Why cant a book be a slog and be loved? Being somewhat
| painful to get through is the price of admission for most
| classic works. Even the most diehard David Foster Wallace
| fan wouldn't challenge someone who said Infinite Jest was a
| slog to get through.
| yuuu wrote:
| Thanks for putting this more eloquently than I could.
| This is an important point that I didn't state. There are
| passages in Moby Dick that are indeed beautiful, but the
| first thing I think of when I hear Moby Dick is how
| painful it is to read.
| yuuu wrote:
| Because I read it and it was a slog. There are large
| portions of the book that are unrelated to the story and
| are painful to get through. But saying that makes you look
| dumb, whereas asserting how much you love it makes you look
| like a fabulously cultured and intelligent connoisseur of
| high literature. Whatever, though.
| lbebber wrote:
| I didn't really care for the story itself that much, I
| was more fascinated by the whaling culture and the
| glimpse it provided of the views of that time and place,
| along with its fantastic writing. Which is why for me it
| wasn't a slog at all.
| yuuu wrote:
| If you're looking for something shorter and more readable
| about whaling, I'd recommend In the Heart of the Sea. The
| (nonfiction) story told there was used by Melville as
| inspiration for Moby Dick. Unlike Moby Dick, that was a
| book I could not put down, but my brain is also the size
| of a peanut.
| lbebber wrote:
| Awesome, thanks for the recommendation
| allturtles wrote:
| I think you should consider the possibility that other
| people sincerely like this book, even the portions you
| found tedious, and aren't just pretending in order to
| show off their culture and intelligence. What does
| 'zabzonk' have to gain from proving his culture and
| intelligence to 'yuuu' and 'allturtles'?
| [deleted]
| mlyle wrote:
| I think a lot of it comes down to how you read it.
|
| I usually read a book in a couple of sittings. This
| favors lighter fare, with copious excitement to keep one
| engaged.
|
| I could never do this with Moby Dick. But with a 10-30
| page reading per day, you hear about some interesting
| thing: perhaps mostly whaling and sailing, perhaps
| advancing the plot and characters. It's not enough to
| sustain an excited big read, but it's certainly enough to
| make you wonder about what you'll read next.
|
| The chapters average 3-4 pages long. I think this is a
| hint that it's intended to be consumed in morsels.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Whether a book is enjoyable or not depends at least as much
| on who reads the book as on the book.
|
| When I was a child, I have read Moby Dick and I have enjoyed
| every part of it very much, including the so-called boring
| parts about the history of whaling and so on.
|
| At that age most of what was described in the book were new
| things for me, so they were interesting.
|
| Half a century later, I would never have patience to read any
| similar book, as it is extremely unlikely that any such book
| could contain anything that I have not read before.
| defen wrote:
| The key is to read one chapter aloud before bed each night
| for 4.5 months. You're not reading it for the plot.
| yuuu wrote:
| What do you think I am, some sort of masochist?
| zabzonk wrote:
| It's not a slog. On the contrary, it is perhaps the ideal
| book for reading while sitting on the loo, or whilst having a
| bath. The chapters are mostly short, and typically cover
| different aspects of characters, plot, and other stuff, and
| are easy to read. Once you have read it through once to get
| an idea of the plot, you can just dip into at random, or re-
| read favourite bits. I used to keep my paperback copy in the
| bathroom.
| billfruit wrote:
| Yes, it is if every sentence in it is a thoughtfully crafted
| poetic fragment.
|
| And many of the chapters essentially nonfiction, a sort of
| encyclopaedia of Whales and Whaling.
|
| "Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron
| rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded
| gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents'
| beds, unerringly I rush! Naught's an obstacle, naught's an
| angle to the iron way!"
| throwawayboise wrote:
| I must be stupid because I read that line you quoted and I
| have no idea what it means. If I need to study and
| deliberately parse every sentence, and think about archaic
| idioms or word meanings, it's just too much effort. Give me a
| Tom Clancy or John Gresham novel.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's apparently the style of the time - _Les Miserables_
| spends a decent amount of time talking about sewers iirc.
| billfruit wrote:
| And minutiae about court cases, legal precedent of the era.
|
| Similar with Count of Monte Cristo as well, the details of
| the Mediterranean smuggling trade it goes into is simply
| amazing.
| derbOac wrote:
| 20000 Leagues Under the Sea also came to mind.
| yissp wrote:
| Ha, so many pages of exhaustively cataloguing aquatic
| species.
| billfruit wrote:
| Perhaps, but I do remember it being smaller than Les
| Miserables, Monte Cristo etc which are massive, almost
| 1500+ pages of material in each of them.
| jxcl wrote:
| I don't know about the other books off the top of my
| head, but Count of Monte Cristo and Dumas' other works
| were published as serials in a newspaper, where I'm
| pretty sure he was paid per word. Such a system really
| encourages going into detail with things that are not
| exactly relevant to the plot :)
|
| (I love all of Dumas' works)
| zokier wrote:
| > And many of the chapters essentially nonfiction, a sort of
| encyclopaedia of Whales and Whaling
|
| Which certainly did not improve it as a novel.
| willyt wrote:
| >...thoughtfully crafted poetic fragment.
|
| Lots of good Victorian writing is like that
|
| Charles Dickens - Any of his works
|
| Rudyard Kipling - Remembered now for children's books but
| also wrote some amazing novels and poetry for adults. He has
| written some pretty trippy stuff too. I remember a poem about
| all the structural parts of a ship talking to each other in a
| storm and another short story about an engineer that's a sort
| of fever dream mixed with a monsoon flood at the bridge he's
| building.
|
| Oscar Wilde - e.g. The Nightingale and the Rose is a
| masterwork of pathos. http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-
| stories/UBooks/NigRos.shtm...
|
| A lot of literature from that period paid attention to the
| the rhythm and flow of the sentences, if you read any of it
| aloud it rolls off the tongue compared to modern writing.
| duffyjp wrote:
| "Without overpassing that narrow boundary which plunges the
| ambitious penman into the ridiculous"
|
| In the modern vernacular, "jumping the shark."
| jimbler wrote:
| Also, it's an amazing audio book, you can really appreciate the
| beauty and musicality (and weirdness) of the language. Especially
| appreciate this version (the Big Read).
| https://soundcloud.com/moby-dick-big-read
| skyechurch wrote:
| I had read Moby Dick before, and found it enjoyable, but
| listening to the William Hootkins audio version opened it up
| for me in a way my reading of the text never did (eg it's
| actually a very funny book, which entirely escaped my notice).
| Whether this is because I was an inattentive reader, or that
| 170 years ago people had fewer demands on their attention, I
| don't know.
| robin_reala wrote:
| If anyone's looking for a nice and libre ebook of _Moby Dick_ , I
| produced one for Standard Ebooks:
| https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/herman-melville/moby-dick
|
| I also put together a collection of Melville's short fiction,
| which includes "Bartleby":
| https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/herman-melville/short-fict...
| DantesKite wrote:
| Thank you for your contributions. Standard Ebooks is one of my
| favorite websites and a delight to people in creative design
| and typography.
| gbjw wrote:
| Thank you so much! Moby-Dick is my favourite novel ---
| appreciate the effort.
| rickspencer3 wrote:
| Thank you!
| lou1306 wrote:
| Going through the Moby Dick one right now, and I must say it's
| a great edition. Thank you and the other Standard Ebooks
| contributors!
| googlryas wrote:
| Thank you for that, I'm definitely going to check out both.
|
| Since I checked out your profile to see what kind of person
| does these beautiful things for free...can you tell me why it
| is so hard to order online from ikea?
| nwatson wrote:
| A very engaging mortician (Ask a Mortician) talks about how the
| real-life events on which the novel "Moby Dick" was based were so
| much more disturbing than the book ...
| https://youtu.be/QS299VkXZxI .
| fortyseven wrote:
| 1851? For some reason I assumed ol' Dick was much older than
| that. Neat.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2701/2701-h/2701-h.htm
| optimalsolver wrote:
| For the lazy, there's a free Moby Dick audiobook on YouTube:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zg84olIrn-kb
| marai2 wrote:
| Nice! It's 23 hours and 54 minutes long! 15 minutes a day
| listen and I'll be done in 100 days!
| dang wrote:
| One past thread:
|
| _The Original 1851 Reviews of Moby Dick_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15209719 - Sept 2017 (29
| comments)
|
| Related:
|
| _' Bartleby the Scrivener' - Herman Melville (1853)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28671613 - Sept 2021 (3
| comments)
|
| _The Man Who Edited Melville (1982)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24736842 - Oct 2020 (1
| comment)
|
| _Herman Melville at Home_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20547911 - July 2019 (2
| comments)
|
| _What Happened to the Book Herman Melville Wrote After 'Moby-
| Dick'?_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16983571 - May
| 2018 (16 comments)
|
| _Why Does Moby-Dick Sometimes Have a Hyphen? (2015)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12939407 - Nov 2016 (19
| comments)
|
| _I Used Google BigQuery to Map the Locations Mentioned in Herman
| Melville 's Books_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11573730 - April 2016 (2
| comments)
|
| _White whale in the big smoke: How the geography of London
| inspired Moby-Dick_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10728471 - Dec 2015 (2
| comments)
|
| _Bartleby, the Scrivener: An interactive, annotated story of
| Wall Street_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10449293 -
| Oct 2015 (9 comments)
|
| _Before Moby-Dick, There Was "Two Years Before the Mast"_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9877987 - July 2015 (12
| comments)
| Celebros wrote:
| Love Moby Dick. One thing I've wanted to do for a few years is
| make the trip to New Bedford Whaling Museum for the annual
| marathon reading.
|
| It's also streamed every year.
|
| https://www.whalingmuseum.org/program/the-moby-dick-marathon...
| gshubert17 wrote:
| There's a whaling museum in Lahaina on Maui, which has lots of
| good stuff. I happened to visit it one time while a book group
| was reading Moby Dick and it made a great impression.
|
| https://www.hawaii-guide.com/maui/sights/whalers_village_mus...
| m_myers wrote:
| Recently ran across this interesting guide to Moby-Dick: "The 100
| Chapters of Moby Dick You Can Skip - And why you won't want to"
| https://baos.pub/the-100-chapters-of-moby-dick-you-can-skip-...
|
| The point is that while most of the book is incredibly boring,
| that's a feature and not a bug.
| dataviz1000 wrote:
| In order to be excited some small part of you must be bored or
| as Melville explains it ...
|
| "To enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold,
| for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is
| merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter
| yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a
| long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more.
| For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished
| with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the
| rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have
| nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the
| cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm
| spark in the heart of an arctic crystal."
|
| -- Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, the Whale
| ericmcer wrote:
| That is a pretty elaborate excuse for the 100s of pages of
| whale taxonomy and physiology that interrupt the narrative.
| StillBored wrote:
| And yet, this book, along with The Count of Monte Cristo,
| Grapes of Wrath, and quite a number of other tomes are assigned
| in high schools by teachers/school districts. Those educators
| think they are providing some kind of service by trying to
| force feed young people books that cannot really be understood
| in a meaningful way by the vast majority of people with ~15
| years of life.
|
| It wasn't until a decade after college that I picked up another
| Steinbeck novel. and after finishing Cannery Row, the only
| question i could ask myself was, WTF were my teachers thinking
| assigning Grapes of Wrath vs some of his much shorter, less
| complex works that could be read in a couple days. The whole
| book is shorter than the section of Grapes that most people
| describe as being the slog you have to get through to enjoy the
| rest of the novel.
|
| I read a lot, and I can say with a fair bit of confidence the
| one long lasting result of assigning these books in HS is to
| guarantee most people have a life long repulsion for long
| "classics".
| gm3dmo wrote:
| Wherever there's a geek beating on a book. I'll be there :)
| zokier wrote:
| Of the many possible "classics" to throw at teenagers I feel
| Moby Dick is far from the worst option. At least it has some
| humor to it, and on one layer it is just an adventure at sea;
| its not just pure pathos. And compared to many others its
| relatively short novel, especially if you skip some of the
| non-essential whaling chapters.
| nineplay wrote:
| The local schools have gotten a lot more into contemporary
| novels and I'm all for it. I see occasional grumblings on the
| FB groups but no one has managed to change the curriculum.
|
| I love classics and every time I read one there's a moment
| when I think to myself "I'm so glad no one is going to make
| me write an essay on this." I don't have to try to pull out
| the major themes, I don't have to discuss about the
| character's motivations, I don't have to consider the novel
| in the context of what was going on in the writer's life
| time. I can just let it wash over me, I can just enjoy it.
|
| It's a miserable and joy-killing way to approach reading.
| Even as I look back to the books I read in High School I
| don't think any every became my favorites. The Great Gatsby
| is a fine book but when I look back on it I remember all the
| sections where we had to point out 'symbolism'. What a drag.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| > HS literature cirriculum having zero relatability to
| students so they're unable to comprehend why the books are
| "great"
|
| I've called it "an overdose of Dead Poet's Society" before.
| Shakespeare plays, Steinbeck, Moby-Dick: they'll all make the
| majority of the class tune out if they're presented as a
| treatise on the human condition. Shakespeare is meant to be
| performed on a stage, not read from a book. Discuss his
| codification of character archetypes and plot tropes, perhaps
| even some wordplay choices. At 16 years old, "a treatise on
| the human condition" is pretentious puffery. Even those
| teacher's pets who take it seriously are merely LARPing as
| well-rounded individuals.
| Kaibeezy wrote:
| What, ho? Someone hath run Neal Stephenson's reviews through
| 1851translator.com?
| sidpatil wrote:
| Ah damn. I tried going to 1851translator.com thinking it was
| real. How disappointing!
| a9h74j wrote:
| I did attempt to access the site which had thus become known
| to me through my travels. Alas, ...
| FredPret wrote:
| Exactly what I thought!
| asimpletune wrote:
| One of the things that I think is strange about Moby Dick is the
| shift in language.
|
| SPOILERS:
|
| So most of the book is just a beautiful snapshot of a very odd
| slice of life in the early 1800s, namely whalers. However, not
| just any whaler, the book is very clear on this, sperm whalers.
| Also, not just any sperm whalers, nantucketers. Even though the
| majority of the crew is international, they are on a nantucket
| ship, with a nantucket captain, and are thus honorary
| nantucketers. Ok, so anyway, most of the book is just about
| learning what their life is like, and it's unusual in the way
| because Melville literally had to teach us everything about this
| unusual slice of life, to get the rest. My point though is
| throughout all of this, which is like 90% of the book, the
| language and tone is somewhat plain and often times light
| hearted. There are a few moments where its serious, like when
| there's the electrical storm and Ahab fixes the compass, or when
| they're towards the end of their journey and they see another
| ship of nantucketers who weren't driven to kill the whale, but
| just to make money and they're just rolling in the dough,
| throwing everything overboard just to make more room for more
| sperm oil.
|
| MORE SPOILERS:
|
| Any way, then in the end is really where we see a huge dramatic
| shift in language. For one thing it becomes *hard*, even as a
| native speaker the sentence structure, word choice, and ideas
| being conveyed are just harder. Basically what's happening this
| whole time is Ahab is trying to kill the whale, is failing to do
| so, and we're sort of consummating what sort of felt inevitable
| the whole time but from Ahab's perspective. I think in this
| sense, Moby DIck is really unique because it's almost two
| stories: there's all the fun stuff about learning about whaling,
| and then there's the artful part of it. The change is very
| dramatic.
|
| Any way, I think it's a great book, but it's very different than
| say Typee, where the whole book stays in the same tone as the
| first part of Moby Dick that I described. The last 50 or so pages
| of Moby Dick, are borderline psychedelic.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > The idea of a connected and collected story has obviously
| visited and abandoned its writer again and again in the course of
| composition.
|
| I have to agree with this. The book certainly has its merits, but
| story isn't one of them...which is sad because I think there
| could be something interesting in the vendetta story, but 90% of
| it was spent discussing whaling (which is interesting on its
| own).
| jrumbut wrote:
| This was approximately what I thought the first time I read it,
| except I didn't find the vendetta story interesting.
|
| On subsequent reads (and especially listening to it read aloud
| and as an audiobook), my opinion turned on its head. The
| structure reflects whaling, with weeks of discussion about
| ropes and navigation punctuated by relatively brief periods of
| excitement.
|
| Ahab and the whale are left vague because that makes them
| grander in the imagination than they could possibly be when
| thoroughly described. The whale is just out there looking for
| squid, it's the people on the boat that have made it out to be
| something different.
| blululu wrote:
| "To convey an adequate idea of a book of such various merits as
| that which the author of Typee and Omoo has here placed before
| the reading public, is impossible in the scope of a review. High
| philosophy, liberal feeling, abstruse metaphysics popularly
| phrased, soaring speculation, a style as many-coloured as the
| theme, yet always good, and often admirable; fertile fancy,
| ingenious construction, playful learning, and an unusual power of
| enchaining the interest, and rising to the verge of the sublime,
| without overpassing that narrow boundary which plunges the
| ambitious penman into the ridiculous; all these are possessed by
| Herman Melville, and exemplified in these volumes."
|
| Could not agree more 170 years later. My girlfriend and I are
| currently reading the book aloud to each other before bed and
| almost every page is a master work of the English language.
| scop wrote:
| I am also reading it for the first time right now. I am
| absolutely blown away by it. It has an energy to it that is
| difficult to convey, as if it was written by a mad man all in
| one sitting.
|
| There are sentences or paragraphs that go on and and on I find
| myself thinking "Ok Melville went a little too far here" and
| then, by golly, he brings it all together in a flourish.
|
| The language is simultaneously as descriptive as anything I've
| read, yet curiously opaque. It's perhaps best described by a
| passage from a novel of similar linguistic stature, Cormac
| McCarthy's _Blood Meridian_ :
|
| > It was the judge and the imbecile. They were both of them
| naked and they neared through the desert dawn like beings of a
| mode little more than tangential to the world at large, their
| figures now quick with clarity and now fugitive in the
| strangeness of that same light. Like things so charged with
| meaning that their forms are dimmed.
| defen wrote:
| McCarthy lists Moby-Dick as his favorite book [1]. The
| otherwise-impenetrable sentence "The Dipper stove." from the
| first page of Blood Meridian will be immediately
| understandable to anyone familiar with early 19th century
| whaling expeditions.
|
| [1] https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/1
| 7/s...
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(page generated 2021-10-22 23:01 UTC)