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Title: The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (Oxford World's Classics) by Herman Melville, Tony Tanner, John Dugdale ISBN: 0-19-283762-1 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: September, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $11.95

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Average Customer Rating: 4 (14 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: What is he really saying?
Comment: The book was fascinating, but not nearly so much as the different opinions about the book and its meaning.

And so here is my theory: The Confidence Man is not a shape-shifter. In fact, there is no character in the book we could call the Confidence Man. The con is within ourselves, an intrinsic part of our natures. We are not conned we con ourselves. Perhaps best illustrated in the part where Melville talks about writing.

In the end, how do you choose the outcome? You will take a walk in the dark, whether it be with faith or fear.

Rating: 1
Summary: Horrible and overrated
Comment: This is like a precurser to the Beat movement of the 1950's. The sentences are overly long, it's written like a police report so you become overly aware that there is a narrator which takes much away from the telling of the story. The characters are not interesting and the story is boring.

Rating: 1
Summary: Not completely worthless.
Comment: I consider Melville's more famous work, "Moby Dick", to be perhaps the most overrated book in the English language; in spite of that, I decided to try this one on the grounds that perhaps my dislike of that one was a fluke (no pun intended) and that perhaps some other of Melville's works might be more congenial.

This book definitely has some advantages over "Moby Dick". It's shorter, for one thing, and the digressions are both shorter themselves, and less frequent. But they are, if anything, even more annoying; if there's anything I LESS need to read than dissertations on the nuts and bolts of 19th century whaling, it's chapters in which an author steps outside of his story to defend details of his writing. What's more, while "Moby Dick" is 400+ pages of story with about 50 pages of plot, this book is 250+ pages with absolutely NO plot; all it is is episodic recitations of one character (a man of 1000 faces) swindling numerous other characters, some more well-developed than others. And if the writing style isn't QUITE as pretentious as in "Moby Dick", it's still too pretentious for my taste.

Still, the book is not completely worthless. It brings to mind some interesting points for debate; which is worse, the con man himself, or the people who he CAN'T swindle because they're so cynical and untrusting? Is it worth becoming that cynical to avoid being gulled by such a con man? Is it possible to retain a reasonable amount of faith in people, and still avoid being swindled? What would have been the appropriate response in (pick a scene)? I would recommend that if you are going to read it, do so as a part of a literary discussion group, or something similar, so that you will have someone to discuss it with. That's where its value lies, certainly not as an entertaining read.

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