Ashley's review
Pierre, or the Ambiguities
by Herman Melville
Ashley's review
Pierre, or the Ambiguities by Herman Melville
Ashley's review
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recommended for: people who love language, people who like it when novels self-implode
there's no getting around it, melville's mastery of language is up there with shakespeare, faulkner, and woolf. it's the kind of language that draws so much attention to itself that, at times, you stop reading for the plot and start reading for the texture of the sentences themselves.
pierre is not so much a story, or a novel, as it is a wildly incoherent narrative progression that, at each stage, seems to turn a corner. the plot certainly turns corners that prove to be irrevocable, as characters make decisions that, as in greek tragedy or shakespeare, inevitably push the action toward a train wreck. but, then, violating even the boundaries of the world the novel set out at the beginning, the story turns and turns in unimaginable directions.
as a story, then, it isn't very cohesive. but as a study of human nature, as bizarre and seeming unreal as it is, melville does seem to get at some of the basic conflicts of human desire, and he certainly plumbs experience to find all of it...more
pierre is not so much a story, or a novel, as it is a wildly incoherent narrative progression that, at each stage, seems to turn a corner. the plot certainly turns corners that prove to be irrevocable, as characters make decisions that, as in greek tragedy or shakespeare, inevitably push the action toward a train wreck. but, then, violating even the boundaries of the world the novel set out at the beginning, the story turns and turns in unimaginable directions.
as a story, then, it isn't very cohesive. but as a study of human nature, as bizarre and seeming unreal as it is, melville does seem to get at some of the basic conflicts of human desire, and he certainly plumbs experience to find all of it...more
