Pierre or The Ambiguities Herman Melville 9781542607070 Books
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“A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities.”
--- Herman Melville, Pierre or, the Ambiguities
Pierre; or, The Ambiguities is a novel, the seventh book, by American writer Herman Melville, first published in New York in 1852. The plot, which uses many conventions of Gothic fiction, develops the psychological, sexual, and family tensions between Pierre Glendinning; his widowed mother; Glendinning Stanley, his cousin; Lucy Tartan, his fiancee; and Isabel Banford, who is revealed to be his half-sister. According to scholar Henry A. Murray, in writing Pierre Melville "purposed to write his spiritual autobiography in the form of a novel" rather than to experiment with the novel and incidentally working some personal experiences into it.
Coming after the lukewarm reaction to Moby-Dick, Pierre was a critical and financial disaster. Reviewers universally condemned both its morals and its style. Critics have more recently shown greater sympathy, seeing it as a "psychological novel -- a study of the moods, thought processes, and perceptions of his hero."
Pierre or The Ambiguities Herman Melville 9781542607070 Books
You, dear reader of this lonely review, see that no one has reviewed this book because, here I am half way through this book's life's journey and feeling woefully inadequate, the book is a wonderfully horrifying challenge. It is another of Melville's masterpieces that, because it's like Moby-Dick but difficult, people even in Melville's time---you know, a time with literate, rounded people who were sans internet and television and avec imagination---did not or could not or would not appreciate. The language is incredibly purple and one senses---I will happily confirm this sensation upon second and third readings---Melville is almost delightfully mocking that which he is also creating as an homage to a sensibility current and popular in his time. Melville is required reading and this book will hurt you but it will hurt in all the right ways.Product details
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Tags : Pierre: or, The Ambiguities [Herman Melville] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. “A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities.” <b>--- Herman Melville, Pierre: or, the Ambiguities</b> Pierre; or,Herman Melville,Pierre: or, The Ambiguities,CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform,1542607078,FICTION Classics
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Pierre or The Ambiguities Herman Melville 9781542607070 Books Reviews
This is a romance to turn you celibate.
Melville's worst.
This can be a difficult work, but it is beautiful. I can't tell you what it is about, because that is part of what it is about - the difficulty of communication.
I find myself in agreement with some of the more astute reviewers here that the critics, from Melville's contemporaries, to Updike, to Spengemann, who writes the Introduction to this Penguin Classics edition, have, to a one, got this book absurdly wrong.
Describing Pierre's library, Melville writes, "Uppermost and most conspicuous among the books were the Inferno of Dante, and the Hamlet of Shakespeare." They are also, it seems to me almost a superfluity to mention, the books Melville most had in mind whilst penning this odd, ponderous work. All comparison to other writers and works - including Melville's own - only hinder the reader.
The plot is indeed threadbare and trite, the dialogue is fusty and the narrative zigs and zags from extremity to extremity with no seeming order. - Actually, quoting Hamlet, "Seems, madam! Nay, it is;" - no real narrative thread to recount but that is tired and worn.
The significance and worth of the book is what transpires in Pierre's mind, just as Hamlet would be nothing without his soliloquies. But the work is emphatically NOT philosophical, as the term is commonly understood, "Plato, and Spinoza, and Goethe, and many more belong to this guild of self-impostors...those impostor philosophers pretend somehow to have got an answer; which is as absurd, as though they should say they had got water out of a stone; for how can a man get a Voice out of Silence?" I suppose the word to describe it is psychological or epistemological, but it is the dark psychology of the Inferno and the epistemology of the doomed Dane.
Everything in the perceptible world is indeed vertiginously ambiguous. As Pierre meditates in the early goings
"Not immediately, not for a long time, could Pierre fully, or by any approximation, realize the scene which he had just departed. But the vague revelation was now in him, that the visible world, some of which before had seemed but too common and prosaic to him, and but too intelligible, he now vaguely felt, that all the world, and every misconceivedly common and prosaic thing in it, was steeped a million fathoms in a mysteriousness hopeless of solution." In other words, Pierre discovers that he lives in a world of ambiguities so disorienting that coming to any sort of terms with it or its inhabitants is a lost, hopeless endeavour.
The book is essentially a recounting of the soul plagued and blessed by intimations of another, spiritual realm and the loss of anything that measures up to them in what becomes, by the end of the book, an Inferno of ambiguities which our wildered 19th Century Hamlet is more than happy to depart.
I do not say that the book measures up in its execution to the two works from which it takes its theme. The wonder is that the theme of our precarious position in this shape-shifting world is braved at all.
I will be using this book as a study guide for writing my own novel. Needed a copy of the book that was inexpensive but in good condition--without other people's marks, so I can mark it up myself.
Pierre is a beautiful work, always slightly ironic. (If it sounds sappy, Melville hopes you're smiling) May be too long for some.
The producer of this version did a fine job, as the text is very clean (lacking in scanning errors). As for the story, I was enthralled by it. It is deep, dark, and disturbing. I look forward to reading analyses of this text as I am confident that I did not discover all that Melville embedded in it. If you are about to read Melville for the first time, don't start with this one.
One of Melville's best. Better than Moby Dick. As good as anything Albert Camus wrote. A true existential classic.
You, dear reader of this lonely review, see that no one has reviewed this book because, here I am half way through this book's life's journey and feeling woefully inadequate, the book is a wonderfully horrifying challenge. It is another of Melville's masterpieces that, because it's like Moby-Dick but difficult, people even in Melville's time---you know, a time with literate, rounded people who were sans internet and television and avec imagination---did not or could not or would not appreciate. The language is incredibly purple and one senses---I will happily confirm this sensation upon second and third readings---Melville is almost delightfully mocking that which he is also creating as an homage to a sensibility current and popular in his time. Melville is required reading and this book will hurt you but it will hurt in all the right ways.
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