A revenge story wrapped around a very long book about whales.
The chapters people skip are the point. Cetology, rope, blubber, the taxonomy of a creature nobody understood yet. The novel keeps stopping to catalogue a world, and the cataloguing is what makes Ahab’s obsession land when it finally arrives.
It is also funnier than its reputation. The opening stretch with Queequeg is comedy.
Worth saying plainly that it is a slog in places and I do not think that is a failure of the reader. The book is long on purpose, and the tedium of the voyage is part of what it is doing.
Read September 2022.
