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Herman Melville : Billy Budd

Next to his white leviathan, Billy Budd is probably Melville’s best-known work. He began working on this profoundly sorrowful tale in 1888, two years after his second son, Stanwix, died alone in a hotel room, likely from tuberculosis. Around 20 years earlier, his firstborn, Malcolm, shot himself in his bedroom at home, aged only 18. To live through the deaths of both children was surely devastating. So though we can’t directly link these tragedies to Billy’s fate, to me it feels like a culmination of them – the destruction of innocence.

Set in 1797, against a backdrop of French Revolutionary Wars and naval mutinies at Spithead and the Nore, the novella unfolds in a world gripped by fear of insurrection. The historical setting is significant: in this climate of paranoia, the preservation of order threatens to eclipse any consideration of individual justice. Billy’s fate becomes inseparable from a society so terrified of disorder that it cannot contemplate room for mercy. Captain Vere is faced with a shattering decision: to uphold naval law against the threat of mutiny, or to spare the beautiful, angelic, and morally innocent Billy.

These days, much is said of the novella’s homoeroticism, which I think is eternally open for debate. Undoubtedly, Billy is the story’s central figure of desire, though I wonder whether some interpretations have become a little misconstrued. It is entirely plausible that Claggart, Billy’s denouncer, desires our protagonist. Tragically, in a society in which such feelings can’t be expressed, love and hate become disturbingly difficult to disentangle. His inexplicable hostility towards Billy certainly invites the possibility that a desire he can’t acknowledge has curdled into jealousy and vengeance; which could be argued, reflects Melville’s own internal struggles. His possible bisexuality has been much discussed, though unlikely ever to be confirmed.

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#billybudd #hermanmelville #literature #bookstagram #bookreview

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Marcel Proust: In Search of Lost Time
Started 03/01/26 – finished 24/10/26

Proust. In Search of Lost Time / Remembrance of Things Past. Done.

This has been a journey, for sure, and one that has had its highs and lows. Undoubtedly, it deserves its place among the greatest works of Western literature. Proust’s prose is staggering: in its beauty, its complex narrative, and its sheer volume. It wasn’t always an easy journey, and at times was fraught with frustration. Do we really need 60 or 80 pages to discuss something that many writers would adequately manage in 10?

But here’s the thing. Time, the passing of it and the loss of it, is at the very core of this work. And that’s exactly what you need to understand if you’re going to read it properly.

I spent 10 months with it, and honestly, I don’t think that’s nearly enough. This is not a work to be rushed (if you can call 10 months rushing).

People talk a lot about its length, but when you consider how many books we here on Bookstagram read even in a single month, seven books really isn’t that much. So length isn’t the point. It’s the time you need to give to Proust’s prose.

Many of us here read a lot of difficult books, really difficult books, and on the surface ‘In Search of Lost Time’ is not a difficult work by comparison. It is, however, incredibly subtle. At least, it was for me. It wasn’t until I was well into the novel that its beauty and ambition really began to dawn on me.

And that, I think, is what readers need to allow time for: the opportunity to experience the reading unfurling for itself.

Should you read all seven books back to back in a month? Even two months? Absolutely not. Just because you can, really doesn’t mean you should.

This work needs space, and, of course, time. I’ll return to it at some point in the future I’m sure, though next time I think better over the course of several years.

The length of Proust’s work is not the real challenge. It’s the literary cathedral he has built, one we need to immerse ourselves in and give the time and space it needs to reveal its full scope and beauty.

#proust #marcelproust #insearchoflosttime #literature #bookstagram

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♾️ “In old age dreams are the weak current that rearranges the sand around your toes when you’re standing on the beach, helping you settle in so you can enjoy the sun and the wind.” ♾️

Years ago, my therapist told me “time does not heal all wounds, it adds layers to them.” If James Elkins experimental novel “Weak in Comparison to Dreams” could be distilled into one brief sentence (which the book itself would resist) I might choose that one. In Samuel Emmer’s world, this obsessive compulsive bacteriologist, this washed-up water management armchair psychoanalyst, there is no freedom, life is like a fire in the distance that doesn’t seem to move, a lovely danger that blazes very (or should I say veery?) slowly. And this fire, which is both dreamt and lived, can promise to chew up the bars of our caged lives, or fulfill the promise of psychoanalysis, where the dream attempts “to heal damage suffered during the day”, but the promise itself is always just smoke on the other side of the mountain, a far-off horizon never reached.

But is life truly weak in comparison to dreams? Perhaps. Emmer asserts that if Proust had lived long enough he would not be so optimistic about memory—for what else is a dream than a forgotten memory, a face that fades into the past and leaves us only with a feeling. Elkins writes, “music is strange portraiture: it preserves every nuance of mood and light, but faces are hard to see. The feelings are exact, but the people are gone.” One might say this is what occurs when reading a book like this. The majority of the book is like the present-tensed lived-experience of life, filled with the exactitude of anxiety and crises, entangled relationships, trauma responses and defence mechanisms, running in circles and figure eights. But time composts our catastrophes, breaking them down into inexact quieter landscapes.

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Many books carry the label “encyclopedic” or, like the works of W.G Sebald, blend genres and mediums like travelogue, visual essay, and documentarian prose fiction. Elkins gathers all of these labels, but what makes his experiment successful is his ability to allow the reader to authentically feel t

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After reading ‘Moby-Dick’ for the first time this week (yup, for the first time!), I think I’ve developed something of a crush on Herman Melville. By reputation, I was expecting MD to be good, but really, I was not prepared. I am entirely blown away (pun intended). It is stunning.

I knew it was more than just a story about a whale hunt, but I wasn’t prepared for its sheer beauty. It is deeply poetic and philosophical, with stunning prose; it is also brutal, gruesome and heartbreaking.

I’ve utterly fallen in love with it. For me, it’s going right up there among my all-time favourites, alongside ‘Ulysses’ and ‘The Recognitions’. I’ll definitely reread it soon, and next time I want to study it properly, as this first read was really just about enjoying it and getting to the end.

I should also say that I definitely found it a comfort read. Its beauty shines through without being nearly as taxing as some of my other most beloved works. Suspecting it might be just this, I chose to read along with an audiobook, and I can highly recommend the version narrated by Anthony Heald (see pics above). Perfect for curling up on the sofa with tea and cushions as the autumnal weather turns.

Sometimes it’s good for the soul simply to enjoy the pleasure of books, without the intellectual taxation.

So, with my newfound admiration for Melville, I’m moving straight on to ‘Billy Budd’, and possibly Andrew Delbanco’s biography. I would also love to reread Rodrigo Fresán’s gorgeous ‘Melvill’.

#mobydick #hermanmelville #classicliterature #billybudd #bookstagram

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William T. Vollmann’s mega-novel is here and it’s worth every minute we had to wait. I feel particularly lucky that I was within driving distance of an event where Bill and Sacramento author @devyndefoe read from their novels, answered questions, and signed all of our copies. In every way both Bill and Devyn were candid, gracious, approachable, and appreciative of the opportunity to engage with us as readers.

It was great getting to see both friends and strangers who have a similar appreciation for the type of books that Bill and Devyn write. It’s hard sometimes to find people outside the internet who feel the way that I do about literature and its necessary effect on our lives. This event was a reminder that there are plenty of other people who know and appreciate this kind of work.

So this is a post commemorating a magnum opus, a debut, and most of all for literature and its effect on us all. Happy reading, folks.

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Feeling very fortunate to have this on my table forever ❤️ See you tomorrow Bill!

#williamtvollmann #atableforfortune #grateful

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“If we hadn’t been expelled, Paradise would soon have felt like a small dull town and we’d have caught the first train. I know better than to pine, for I am a student of history, which is, after all, a chronicle of missed opportunities, invitations unsent though nicely signed, plans gone awry, cakes half baked.”

What would happen if Holden Caulfied grew up to be a misogynist asshole in academic garb? If he became a poet who could wax loftily about tits and “transmogrify a turd”? Can complaining be an art form, bigotry be a craft tended to in darkness and isolation, disappointment lend itself a political reality? Can digging a tunnel be a “quarrel with the earth?”

“The Tunnel” by William H. Gass raises these questions, raised by a man who crawls out of a hole in which he is prepared to (pretend to) die, only “to let loose one last opinion” before expiring forever “like a worm.” On the surface (of the tunnel?), “The Tunnel” is a diatribe against society, as though Umberto Eco’s protagonist of “The Prague Cemetery”—the shadowy figure who scribed the antisemitic tract “The Elders of the Protocols of Zion”—were to take his hand at a kind of Cioranian cynicism, his own rendition of “The Trouble With Being Born.” The effect Gass’ character, William Frederick Koehler, has on the reader somewhat resembles Philip Roth’s Mickey Sabbath, in that the first impression looks dark, horrible, and as the book tunnels into something more complex, a true-to-life psychoanalysis occurs, a portrait of a bigot, a Nazi-sympathizer, a member of “the party of disappointed people,” a person whose envy, spite, malice, and loneliness has fashioned in them what Gass has famously dubbed a “fascism of the heart.”

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What do you make of a life that’s already lived and died while you still inhabit it? How do you make sense of it when it happens more than once? What if it’s about to happen again? These are the kinds of questions I found myself confronting as I finished James Elkins’ Weak in Comparison to Dreams. At this point, much has been written describing the premise of the novel, so I won’t dwell on that. Instead, I’d rather share some of my experience in reading it.

I began this novel semi-naively, knowing vaguely who Samuel Emmer was, and that he was to visit zoos around the world, but around 150 pages into the novel, things finally began to fall into place for me such that I almost felt obligated to begin the novel from the top.

What appears on the surface as a story of a man driven to the brink by a failed marriage and festering dissatisfaction with his job and/or life is actually (I believe) a sort of Faustian exploration of how that life begins to unravel both inside and around him. He is epistolarily dissected and examined by his research assistants, and hopeless in terms of any real help he could offer the animals of the zoos. In fact, the animals function as a sort of mirror for Emmer’s own behaviors and life.

He is also plagued by dreams which do not behave like dreams; they continue in an unbroken stream in which he is fully cognizant from one moment of sleep to the next, showing him an increasingly dire scene of voracious forest fires. And so Samuel Emmer finds himself pressed on both sides towards a narrowing course of action left to him: escape from his own reality.

I personally believe there is a strong Judeo-Christian allegorical angle to Samuel Emmer’s story. Once I saw it, starting with Vipesh and Viperine’s names, I couldn’t help but find it everywhere; an expulsion from the Garden of Eden, a descent into Dante’s Inferno, Death and rebirth. It is this narrative thread that will have me reading, re-reading, and researching this novel/project for years to come. Suffice to say that Weak in Comparison to Dreams was one of the most transformative reading experiences of my life. I love literature. What a privilege to get to experience works like these.

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💀🍂 Some books I’ll be attempting to read this October

#fallreading #octobertbr #octoberreads #readingplans

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In my last post, I promised that I would give some thought to potential contenders for the category of “A Great American Novel.” Here are five I can speak to based on personal experience and another three that I have a strong suspicion about.

JR is the quintessential critique of American capitalism and the rot that eats away the heart of all of our lives. Its scenes are barebones; you get the sense that it could be a play acted out in a theatre in the round with little to no set, but the dialogue and prose elevate this from a quirky story about a boy who constructs a corporate empire from the back of a magazine into a careful consideration of what’s at the very core of a person in modern day America. For that alone I think it deserves to be in this category.

Tree of Smoke is a Great American Novel on the basis of its “Ideas.” There aren’t many novels that I know of that take up the notion of the Vietnam War and how it affected the country on an individual level. There’s an undercurrent of anxiety and helplessness to the characters here, and it feels poignant in a way that speaks to an American way of thinking about the world.

I have not read the Dying Grass yet, but I think the entire Seven Dreams series is a uniquely qualified project for A Great American novel, on the premise that each of them is about the interactions of indigenous Americans with white colonial powers. I firmly believe that The Seven Dreams should be read the way that Shogun or Gore Vidal is read, by which I mean to say ubiquitously and with due reverence.

The Public Burning is a tried and true postmodern masterpiece where Coover places the notion of America front and center. If this one has a fault for “Great American Novel” contention it’s that it’s a little too on the nose at times, but its subject matter, prose styling, and themes explored make it a perfect example of an absurdist entry in the category.

Mason and Dixon is also a perfect example of a Great American Novel because not only does it chronicle the origins of some of the original surveys that helped carve and chart this continent, but it’s also told in the rich oral tradition of a simpler America. Wicks Cherrycoke is a

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More jumbled thoughts the algorithm certainly won’t like! But I’d still like to hear from you.

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“The worship of the word must be pagan and polytheistic. It cannot endure one god.”

Blue is not one but many blues, cyan, cerulean, cobalt, and so a philosophical inquiry begins about blue pencils, blue noses, blue movies, the blues as a film, a kind of song, a feeling, and Gass shades in as many blues as he can. Blue as private as sex and as public as the sky, it is “the dark inside of sentences, sentences which follow their own turnings inward out of sight like whorls of a shell, and which we follow warily…”

Though he praises Henry James, no one writes with such affection for language as Gass, I simply won’t believe he could be outdone in his adoration for the word as a way to the world. And a blue world it is! Blue mantle of the virgin. Blue in the pantry and the kitchen, a blue-being-in-the-world, a qualifier of the “slick sharp high bright thin quick sour new and cool or low deep sweet thick dark soft slow smooth heavy old and warm.” Blue is the stones that Molloy sucks on and the chewing words that Gass munches like long blue grass. Gass soliloquies thus: “There is a swim of blue in the toothbrush glass. The loneliness of clothes draped over the backs of chairs; undies, empty lobbies, rumpled spreads[…]blue belongs to the past—to the minutes after masturbation, to thought, to detachment and removal, fading to the inside side of sex and the self that in the midst of pitch and toss has slipped away like a lucky penny fallen from the dresser.”

How can I write anything about this book without bathing in the body of its sensual text, swimming between pools of blue quotes? More and more hues and objects—“Blue bloods, balls, and bonnets, beards, coats, collars, chips, and cheese”—and the mood of Mondays and the mopes, the blue hot searing flame of rage, and the blue of grief in the absence of presence, the blue of being and the blue of non-being. Who else could write Blue like Gass?

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