QOTD: WHAT CLASSIC NOVEL DID YOU MOST ENJOY READING?

Not sure it applies to favorites, most enjoyeds, but since I don’t have a singular one, I’ll use it: beware the man o’ (war) one book.

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Melville wrote a (few) good one(s). The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, is one of them. If you should decide to read it, a good, necessary even, companion volume is H. Bruce Franklin’s The Wake of the Gods – Melville’s Mythology.*

O’ Lost (or anything else) by Thomas Wolfe.

*Inside jacket: This striking reinterpretation of Herman Melville’s major works shows how Melville’s conscious use of myths & mythological theories defines large parts of the structure & meaning of Mardi, Moby-Dick, Pierre, Bartelby**, Benito Cereno, The Confidence-Man, & Billy Budd.

The author sketches the historical context of Melville’s mythology: the invasion of Western culture by pagan gods; the development of systematic psychological theories to explain religion; the Christian counterattacks on these theories; the great linguistic events which changed all existing ideas about prehistory; Melville’s own voyage into a pagan world. The chapter on Mardi shows that Melville in his first major work develops from contemporaneous mythological theories his own conceptions of the nature, origin, & functions of gods & myths. The remaining chapters describe what Melville created from the mythologies of the Hindus, the Polynesians, the Incas, the Egyptians, the Nebrews, the Buddhists, the Welsh***, the Greeks, the Romans, & the Christians.

We see, for example, why Melville makes a Nantucket whaling ship hunt the Egyptian monster Typhon, a Mississippi riverboat carry the avatars of the Hindu Vishnu, & a modern British man-of-war serve as the sacrificial altar of the ancient British god known as Beli, Bili, & Budd.

Included is an index of the non-Judaic-Christian gods, myths, & religions in Melville’s works.

**In the season 1 episode of Ozark titled “Kaleidoscope”, Marty explains to his wife Wendy that, if Del asks him to work for the drug cartel, he will respond as Bartleby would: “I’ll give him my best Bartleby impersonation, and I’ll say, ‘I prefer not to’.”

***This pretty woman-child is Welsh. Mother is Trinidadian-Chinese, father is German-Estonian, & the arbitrary mapline exingencies of where womb was exited make her “Welsh.”