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Title: The Confidence Man (Literary Classics (Prometheus Books)) by Herman Melville ISBN: 1-57392-038-X Publisher: Prometheus Books Pub. Date: September, 1995 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.73 (11 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Melville's Enigmatic American Testament.
Comment: With "The Confidence-Man," Melville offered a final novelistic expression of his hopes, doubts, and frustrations about the American nation on the verge of Civil War in the late 1850's.
Many critics and reviewers take a negative point of view on this novel, saying that the narrative instability and episodic nature of the novel represents Melville's anger with the increasingly poor reception of his later novels, including the brilliant "Moby-Dick".
Over the course of the novel's first half, we are presented with a string of characters who spout the virtues of charity and trust, all supposedly different manifestations of one Confidence-Man. The confidence-man engages passengers of the riverboat Fidele from St. Louis to New Orleans in philosophical, literary, personal, and business-related conversations. This is the heart of the novel, even in the second half, where only one confidence-man appears. As in Cervantes' "Don Quixote," you are able to tease out more about the ambiguous purposes of the novel through speeches rather than actions.
At points amusing, horrifying, and sad, "The Confidence-Man" is difficult, if not impossible to categorize in any simple fashion. An extremely worthwhile read, especially if you read it as a prophetic work of the American Civil War and try to figure out for yourself if Melville thought things would turn out alright, or if the US was due for an apocalyptic judgment.
Rating: 5
Summary: Quite an Original
Comment: Quite an Original
The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade
I am specifically reviewing the Northwestern University Press edition of Melville's "The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade."
There is a Norton Critical Edition of this novel edited by Hershel Parker, but it doesn't seem to be offered by Amazon.com. It is offered at at W.W. Norton's website... The Hendricks House edition edited by Elizabeth Foster is another good edition, but it seems to be out of print at the moment.
On November 12, 1856 Herman Melville and Nathanial Hawthorne took a walk among the sandhills near Liverpool, England. They smoked cigars, and Hawthorne wrote about a week later that Melville spoke of Providence and futurity, and he, Melville, had pretty much made up his mind to be annilated.
"The Confidence-Man" is the last novel that Melville published during his lifetime. I agree with Newton Arvin, who called "The Confidence-Man" "one of the most infidel books ever written by an American; one of the most completely nihilistic, morally and metaphysically."
About 150 years after the book was first published, and about fifty since the book was first taken seriously by literary critics, The Confidence-Man is not a settled matter. In fact there remains excessive discord among readers and critics about the worth of this novel. Some compare it to Swift's "Tale of the Tub," others will tell you that this book is static and formless.
The idea is simple enough. On April 1 a devil in the guise of a deaf mute goes aboard a Mississippi river steamboat, and begs for charity. In rapid succession he transforms himself into a crippled Black man, a man with the weed, the man in the grey coat , the gentleman with the big book, the man with the plate and finally the Cosmopolitan. In these different guises he gulls and diddles people. He asks for trust. He is not always successful, but he can take solace in his failures. The reason for the devil's failures is the cyniscim, mistrust and mysandry of his marks. It is their human failings that accounts for his failures. And that's not so bad for the devil.
Melville's control of his material was never greater. I recommend the Northwestern Newberry edition because it contains draft fragments of chapter 14. You can see how carefullly Melville wrote this novel. The blandness of the prose is deliberate. If you read the surviving drafts you will see how Melville purposedly silenced and muted his message. Perhaps Melville was too successful for even close readers get lost sometimes.
At the end there is an increase of seriousness. An old man closes his Bible and asks for a life preserver. The Cosmopolitan hands the old man a chamberpot which appears to be full, and calls it a life preserver. The Cosmopolitan then extinguishes the lamp, and then leads the other into the darkness.
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.
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Title: Pierre, Or, the Ambiguities (Penguin Classics) by Herman Melville, William C. Spengemann ISBN: 0140434844 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: January, 1996 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (Penguin Classics) by Herman Melville, John Bryant ISBN: 0140434887 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: February, 1996 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Moby-Dick by HERMAN MELVILLE ISBN: 0553213113 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 01 February, 1981 List Price(USD): $4.95 |
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Title: Nashville 1864: The Dying of the Light: A Novel by Madison Jones ISBN: 187994135X Publisher: J S Sanders & Co Pub. Date: June, 1997 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: The Blithedale Romance by John Updike, Nathaniel Hawthorne ISBN: 0375757201 Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: 14 August, 2001 List Price(USD): $7.95 |
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