Pierre, or the Ambiguities : Kraken Edition, The

Rating:
Summary: More light and the gloom of that light
Review: "In those Hyperborean regions, to which enthusiastic truth and earnestness, and independence, will invariably lead a mind fitted by nature for profound and fearless thought, all objects are seen in a dubious, uncertain and refracting light." One long, gorgeous inquiry into the nature of religion, spirituality and the stars, galaxies and planets of our firmament. American authors just don't come any more honest or more wise. He parodies and inverts Christianity; he shines on; the ashes of trad. belief are left in his wake.

Rating:
Summary: Melville's Wrong Turn
Review: Ah, Pierre, you lusty Frenchman, where do you go wrong? Actually the main character Pierre is an American in the early 19th century who is well-off leading an easy life, until suddenly a mysterious woman crosses his path, who happens to be his sister, that he has rather strong feelings for, not to mention the creepy way he calls his mother sister in the early part of the book. Overly dramatic, it reads as if Melville made it up as he wrote, since so many crucial facts and events are suddenly mentioned with no foreshadowing or even hint of them. It does have a brief amusing chapter that attacks critics as people who praise medicore writers that risk nothing. Melville desperately wants Pierre to be like Shakespeare's Hamlet, butt alas, Pierre is much too flat and shallow for that. Aside from Melville Scholars, this novel isn't worth serious reading and skimming a few chapters would demonstrate it's many problems. Go for "Moby-Dick" or "Bartleby the Scrivner" for a real sense of Melville's writing.

Rating:
Summary: America's Greatest Artist/Prophet
Review: I think of two points here than which nothing is more obvious.
1. This novel about a young man from high American society in the late 19th century who gradually discovers the spiritual corruption of his family, his society and of all ordinary human consciousness is a work of genius that remains more modern, more penetrating of frontiers, and more bold in form and content than any American novel before it or after it. It is in that small group of the most profound novels ever created.

2.America has never even begun to really absorb and integrate the genius of Melville, especially as it is manifested in this novel. Americans have so much time and opportunity to cultivate artistic sensitivity, but mostly they choose not to. Most 'educated' Americans have no familiarity with this novel. And this is not an accident. America has always been afraid of Melville, has rejected him, and turned him into a harmless museum-piece, a distinguished man of letters, but he is in reality America's horned black sheep, it's enfant terrible. Pierre is safely put away on dusty library shelves. But this book still burns with prophetic energy and one day the truth of its fire will burn through the walls that enclose it.
Stars? I would give this book enough stars too fill the sky.
"Enter this enchanted wood ye who dare."

Rating:
Summary: Memorable and Disturbing
Review: It's been since grad school, in the early 80s, that I last read Melville's "Pierre", yet it's stuck to my ribs ever since. I recall a quote from Freud, that he ventured nowhere that a poet hadn't preceeded him, and I have to wonder if he had this unfortunately obscure masterpiece in mind. For Melville examines themes of psychology and sexuality as no other writer before him...excepting perhaps the Pagan mystics of old Europe. "Pierre" brilliantly illuminates the darknesses of the human psyche, those tunnels and strange rooms few of us ever explore, lest we be artists and therefore honest and courageous enough to sacrifice our egos. Melville considered "Pierre" his most important work, a suitable novel to follow "Moby Dick" (justifiably considered by many THE great American novel). Yet I find "Pierre" more moving, because more tragic, than "Moby Dick"--Ahab is obsessed and while his obsessions mixed with his intelligence make him complex, he is clearly one-dimensional in his drive. Pierre, however, is drawn by instincts which defy his conscious realization, by desires which emanate from the dark belly of humanity and therefore can't be seen. Ahab wants revenge; Pierre wants fulfillment. For a landlocked person such as myself, "Pierre" is also an easier read: no boggling display of nautical terminology to refer to on every page. Yeah, Freud was right: he owed a great deal to the poets...and while, technically, Melville was more storyteller or novelist than poet, here is a poetry there that's unmistakeable. Embrace this book, and embrace the spirit of the great man who possessed the courage to write it.

Rating:
Summary: A very good, yet difficult work.
Review: Most people did not like this work by Herman Melville. It certainly did not garner the attention that "Moby Dick," "Billy Budd," or "Typee" did. "Pierre" is a startingly original work, about a young man who is lost through his subsconscious illicit love for his sister and his desire to the right thing.

The characterizations in this subtle, dense work are nothing short of amazing. My favorite character was Pierre's sister. Is she an innocent, wracked with guilt and sorrow over the misfortunes and injustices the world has foisted upon her? Or is she an amoral Siren...determined to wreck Pierre's life? A truly compelling character, and no one can say either characterization fits entirely without its flaws.

The premise of the story is this: All is going right with Pierre's life. He has financial security, and a beautiful fiancee. All this changes when Pierre finds out he has an illegitmate sister who has been shunned by society and cast out. He contacts her and tries to use his own position to help her, but ends up dragged into the depths of human misery himself.

Permeating this narrative throughout is the spectre of incest... what does Pierre actually FEEL for this sister of his?

A very provocative tale.

Rating:
Summary: American Heartbreak
Review: Pierre has all the markings of an awful book--flat characters, overblown writing, shameless melodrama. So why is it such a masterpiece? Melville seems to have put all of himself into this work--his despair, his religious doubts, his understanding of human psychology--with an intensity that makes the usual standards of plot, style and character obsolete. The analysis of Pierre's mother as she turns on her husband/son and Melville's agonizing descriptions of the writing process were two of the book's highlights for me. The Beats loved Pierre--maybe they saw a model for their own art, where elegance takes a back seat to energy. The novel was a critical disaster at the time, but look where it ranks on amazon 150 years later. I hope Melville's somewhere watching.

Rating:
Summary: deeper than beauty... heavier than death...
Review: This novel, which I believe to be the greatest ever written by an American, is far too complex and profound to be neatly summarized here. It relates the story of Pierre, a young man born into American high society in the late 19th century, who gradually discovers that his beloved family and society are in reality profoundly false and corrupt. The analysis of this corruption in the novel is centered in the fact that Pierre's deceased and revered father has an unacknowledged, abandoned daughter whose existence Pierre discovers. Pierre attempts to stand up against this corruption and from there the unbreakable threads unwind steadily into tragedy. This is no melodrama or romantic fantasy, it is tragedy as objective and profound as anything created by Aeschylus or Sophocles. It is more bold and profound than anything ever conceived by Melville's contemporary, Hawthorne. But it connects Hawthorne with the Greeks in a most unexpected way: Pierre, or The Ambiguities is the only novel I know of that could be called an authentic Christian trgedy. What I mean is that Melville presents Pierre to us deliberately in a light that recalls classical tragedy all the way back to its mythological roots. He compares Pierre with the rebel, earth-born, giant, Enceladus, brother of the Titans, who perished in his struggle against the transcendent tyranny of Zeus. But though a giant, Enceladus was a mortal who could not overcome corrupt divine power. And early in the novel, in the first chapter, long before we are introduced to the comparison with Enceladus, Melville tells the reader clearly, even while he so beautifully describes the beauty of Pierre and his fiancee, Lucy, that we are dealing with a story of tragic fate, of doomed mortality colliding with divinity: Nemo contra Deum nisi Deus ipse ( No one against the Gods unless a God himself.) But the God that Pierre collides with is not Zeus, but the inscrutable Christian God who seemingly inspires him. The amazing ambiguity here is that it is by trying to be a Christian that Pierre, a beautiful, but mere, mortal, is brought relentlessly to his destruction. Why? For what possible purpose?
One of the most impressive and profound elements of this story is Pierre's relationship with his fiancee, Lucy, and his discovered sister, Isabel. Both of these amazing females, though real individuals, seem to be countering reflections of Pierre's tormented soul, one bright and glorious, the other dark and mysterious, both essential and necessary. What is the answer? What resolution can there be? What is the nature of this mortal? And of this God whose only voice is silence?
If you have not read Pierre, then you have not experienced the deepest places that American ficion has ever gone. Melville was ostracized and virtually exiled for writing Pierre. It went too far, too deep. America has never forgiven him, has never given him his rightful place, but he was and remains America's greatest artist.