Even those who have not made it all the way through
Moby Dick (I currently have three people in my life who have never finished, all of whom will remain nameless, but one is my father, one is my boyfriend, and one is a coworker who shares my middle name), even if you've never done anything more than heft the book off the bookstore shelf for a moment before setting it back down and rubbing your strained muscles, you probably know that Moby Dick is a white whale whose evasive nature has made him the perfect metaphor for, well, anything.
In fact, perhaps the most prevalent meaning of Melville's white whale is the enigmatic nature of the beast itself. Lately though,
Moby Dick has been anything but elusive. He's everywhere at Booksmith. Choose almost any section and you'll find him: from art books to pop-ups, fiction to destination literature, U.S. history to children's books, Melville is becoming a presence in bookstores difficult to ignore.
Why? In a recent article published in
The Rumpus, Roary Douglas claims
Moby Dick maintains its popularity for the fact that someone could write an essay for every page of the book. David Foster Wallace, apparently, wrote three essays on one chapter. Douglas's essay is about
Moby Dick as travelogue, which is exactly what it is. I challenge anyone to read the first chapter (come on, just the first) without making a trip to the seashore, or booking a whale watching cruise, soon after.
Still struggling to find an essay in every page? How about a drawing? Matt Kish recently published an art book the heft of
Moby Dick, in fact, it contains the same number of pages. In
Moby Dick in Pictures Kish has created a work of art for each page in the novel. An impressive task. For example, how would you illustrate:
For so revolvingly appalling was the white whale's aspect, and so planetarily swift the ever-contracting circles he made, that he seemed horizontally swooping upon them?
If you like the visual approach to so much text, there is a pop-up in our kids' section. Or you can try the
Classic Starts version in children's books. This is part of a new series that strives to make classic literature palatable for beginning readers.
Skeptical that a narrative as intricate as
Moby Dick could be translated into juvenile language, I took a look at how Classic Starts chose to "retell" the story. The book, thankfully, preserves the first line, and even the one that soon follows about Ishmael feeling so restless that he wanted to knock the hats off of people's heads: so far, so good. Plus, you only have to wait until chapter six (as opposed to twenty-eight) to finally meet the infamous Captain Ahab, and the entire book is only 141 pages. Any references to
spermaceti, however, are excluded.
When I first read Moby Dick a little over a year ago, I read Phillip Hoare's
The Whale simultaneously. The book just came out in paperback this year and is a wonderful supplement to those readers who get hooked on all the whale facts artfully woven into Melville's narrative. Hoare takes you
from his experience swimming with whales to the Whaling Museum in New Bedford (where you can also find Melville sights such as the Seamen's Chapel, lined with memorials to men who lost their lives to whales and complete with a pulpit that looks like a ship's prow).
And if you are more interested in the life of the author, try Jay Parini's novelization of Melville's life,
Passages of HM, released this month in paperback.
Still not convinced you want to pick it up? Start with Nathaniel Philbrick's new book
Why Read Moby Dick, and if he doesn't convince you, I give up. Philbrick has written on this subject before—his
In the Heart of the Sea tells the true story of the
Essex, the whaling boat whose tragic tale inspired Melville to write his novel.
These books all orbit around the novel, much in the same way Melville describes a pod of whales circling their young. Even outside of the bookstore, I'm surrounded by references to the novel. My copyediting class was assigned a passage from Melville to proofread. And last week, a play of
Moby Dick was even showing at the Paramount. I tried to go, but it was sold out. The white whale wins again.
The narrator makes mention that all Grenouille's doings belong to the "fleeting realm of scent," and it's kind of crazy to think about how smell is so ephemeral, but our memories of scents and their immediate impressions are almost inescapable. I had a friend who had anosmia (no sense of smell) and every once in a while he would recall one of the two things he smelled before he lost his sense entirely: blue kool-aid. We were walking together one day and randomly he said, "does this tree smell like blue kool-aid?" I took a whiff to humor him, but alas it just smelled like cedar. "Darn, I can smell it so strongly. I could swear I was smelling it for real."
In Diane Ackerman's A Natural History of the Senses, she spends a bit of time talking about literary entanglements with scent: Proust, Dickens, Lady Murasaki. It's a sense that can be overlooked in writing, but when it's given its full due, it can really be so evocative. I have only to read the world lavender, or vanilla or citrus and immediately my brain is reminding me what those things smell like. When authors throw scents into a book it immediately draws me in. I'm alert, attentive and my mind is exactly where they might want me: disgusted and near-wretching in the fish market or peacefully reclining in a pleasant garden. But sense all this for yourself! Stop by and smell our wares, and check out one of the many books that recall this fleeting realm.
As Thanksgiving approaches, our minds fill with the people we are grateful for, those who make up our everyday, those we keep close despite the distances between us. In an effort to bridge those distances we book our flights, stand in security lines, sit in hours of traffic, or send cards and gifts in our absence. On Thanksgiving, we become pilgrims again, traveling back to the places from which we come, or to the places that are growing dear, to the places that inspire us.
