Melvill

by Rodrigo Fresán

Regístrese y archívese, aunque se prefiera no hacerlo: Es la noche del 10 de diciembre de 1831 y Allan Melvill cruza a pie el congelado río Hudson.

A partir de las figuras de Herman Melville y de su padre Allan Melvill, surcando días de infancia junto al lecho de un alucinado y noches de escritor crepuscular que ya no empuña pluma ni arpón, Melvill sale a la caza del enigma de la siempre huérfana vocación literaria, del legado del estigma familiar, de los navegantes de la ficción y de los náufragos de la realidad.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Latin American, Spanish Literature, 21st Century, Literary Fiction, Spain

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 20, 2022

About the author

Rodrigo Fresán nació en Buenos Aires en 1963 y vive en Barcelona desde 1999. Es autor de los libros Historia argentina, Vidas de santos, Trabajos manuales, Esperanto, La velocidad de las cosas, Mantra, Jardines de Kensington, El fondo del cielo y La parte inventada.

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls]

Fresán wears his influences not so much on his sleeve, but plastered on billboards all over the city and written in the sky by a fleet of rickety Cessnas. In the monumental three-part ‘part’ trilogy, the intoxicating whirlwind of allusions, homages, and shameless bookishness worked in tandem with the rambling breathlessness of the prose to create optimum wowness. In narrowing the frame of reference to the obscure realm of Herman Melville’s papa Fresán seems to flounder. The frustrating decision to engulf the first part in nano-fonted footnotes (an overegged technique) muddles and frustrates the narrative, and as the novel moved into the second part—a faux-poetic digression on glaciology—my interest banked straight into an iceberg and sank beneath the deep. Read up to p.100.

[None Ofyourbusiness Loves Israel · Rating 1 out of 5]

Melvill is a hall of mirrors masquerading as a historical novel. It pretends to tell the story of Herman Melville's father, Allan Melvill, but in truth it is a portrait of obsession: paternal, literary, and metaphysical. Fresan treats biography like taffy, stretching fact until it gleams translucent and then folding it back into fiction until the seams vanish.

Melvill Sr. is at the end of his rope, figuratively and financially, crossing the frozen Hudson River one night in 1831. It is an image Fresan cannot stop polishing: a father, delirious and destitute, walking across ice toward a family sliding into ruin, while his twelve-year-old son Herman watches and absorbs everything. That crossing becomes the novel's repetitive spiritual and aesthetic engine, the moment that invents both madness and Moby-Dick.

The story then loops backward through Allan's youth: a self-important Boston merchant who tours Europe like a colonial dandy, dazzled by aristocrats, salons, and an ambiguous companion named Nico C. Their relationship shares devotion, art, and unease, like Byron's letters rewritten by a man who is about to go bankrupt. Allan flees that world and returns home carrying too much shame, too many debts, and the wrong kind of memories.

The second section, "Glaciology; Or, The Transparency of the Ice" is spliced with theology and marine biology. Allan's breakdown unfolds in delirious fragments, his mind turning into a cathedral of ice where biblical psalms mix with hallucinations of travel, commerce, and cosmic punishment. He mutters, sings, and frightens the family; his son listens, fascinated and terrified, as the father dissolves into myth. The house fills with creditors, snow, and bad omens.

The final part, "The Son of the Father," moves the voice to Herman, who tries to interpret what happened. He remembers the father's stories, his fall, his grandeur, his noise. In his recollection, Allan becomes both a tragic ruin and a muse.

Fresan's style is lavish, compulsive, and amused by its own digressions. He quotes Nabokov, Barthelme, Dylan, and half the Western canon; he treats sentences like orchestral swells. Beneath the verbal fireworks, the plot is nothing exciting: a father goes mad, a son watches, and the son becomes a writer because of it.

This is one of the most pretentious, unreadable, self-infatuated books I have ever endured. A monument to literary arrogance, it tries to pass incoherence as brilliance and emptiness as profundity.

Fresan writes as if the goal were to punish the reader for showing up. Every sentence struts and collapses under the weight of its own ego. The experience of reading it feels like being cornered by a drunk academic who insists that nonsense becomes wisdom if you italicize it enough.

There is no plot worth following, no emotion worth feeling, and no point worth finding. It is the kind of book that believes difficulty equals greatness, when in truth it is only evidence of profound insecurity. Proof, if any were still needed, that not everything thought should be written, not everything written should be published, and not everything published should be read.

I feel that Melvill is a bloated, joyless desecration of Melville's name, an exercise in self-worship posing as literature.

Ironically, one of the few worthwhile passages in the novel captures exactly what I think of the book itself:

"...How strange! And stranger still is, now that I think of it, the paradoxical mystery that reading is an act that comes after writing... Good readers will be like whales hunted to the point of extinction and, for that reason, they won’t be able to mate and give birth to good writers... the elegant silence of the most eloquent spell ever cast will be broken: the silence in which you read and write and (and if there is any luck in this wretched world) you read what you wrote for and to yourself in the same way you wrote for someone else..."

Fresan was right about one thing: the bad writers have outnumbered the good readers. Melvill is proof of it. Melvill without an e is a Perec void without the humor, originality, or purpose, a hollow experiment that mistakes absence for meaning and self-indulgence for art.

[Yahaira · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was such a ride

----------------
rewriting or reimagining our parents


I don't even know how to summarize Melvill. Herman’s dad Allan crosses the frozen Hudson to get home and ends up dying a month later. In between, he's strapped to a bed in delirium, dictating his life story to a 12 year old Herman. This book gets really weird, really meta, really fun super quick. References are being thrown at you at a mile a minute and I was trying to keep up. Then time goes all weird, are we time traveling? Is time a flat circle? Is time not real when fiction and life meet? Do you live through all time as long as you're remembered?

One of the big questions is what influence did Allan have on Herman’s writing? There's this moment at a seance where someone asks why do we not remember the lessons taught when our parents are alive instead of going to this extreme to ask again 😂 Just like Allan, Herman never got to see what an influence he would have on literature through a failure that broke (exploded?) new ground. I don't know if it was walking through Manhattan while listening to Melville talk about Manhattan (back to that temporal game again) that just took this to another level for me, but the last part of the book got me so emotional.

[Jim Elkins]

What is Sloppy Writing?

There's a problem well known to expressionist painters: if you paint rapidly and intuitively, you can create something that has more energy, freedom, and expressive meaning than a painting that's done slowly and carefully. The risk, however, is that free brushstrokes can make a mess that isn't especially expressive. Painters like Emil Nolde and Frank Auerbach knew this very well. Auerbach kept painting, sometimes for months, until something emerged, so there are relatively few canvases that don't have a sense of composition and coherence. Nolde left many more canvases, and the collected works are an instructive book for any artist who paints in the expressionist tradition, because a number of Nolde's pictures are inert. Sometimes all the colors blended to gray, the colors canceled themselves out, and whatever force there was in the canvas became a lax muddle.

Fresán says he wrote this book quickly (p. 312), and often the sequence of writing is clear—the rush to get things onto the page, the sudden bursts of pathos or clots of historical detail, the near-repetitions and improvised fantasies. Often this works, but as Nolde's paintings show, it is risky to assume that the energy and inspiration of writing will always produce expressive results.

I'll push the analogy to painting one more step: reading a novel can be like looking at a painting for a long time. In the first few pages I was taken by the odd transitions between historical documentation and memoir, between memoir and fantasy. But as the novel went on, I stopped seeing those transitions asexpressive: instead I saw them as opportunities to reconsider, to edit, to reorder. Some examples, from the opening section in which the famous Melville speaks in the footnotes, annotating his book about his father Allan Melvill. At the same time, Fresán the writer is there, channeling Herman.

- Toward the end of the opening section, Fresán/Melvill says he can't write more about his father. It is "almost as exhausting and distressing" to write about Allan, he says, as it must have been for Allan to live his disastrous life (p. 56). This would make sense if the story of Allan was nearing its end, or if the author had continued to develop the idea of exhaustion while he wrote, but it's not either of those, it's a passing, occasionally recurring theme, and the complaint is here because Fresán thought of it at the moment he was writing the one footnote. It is expressive in context, but the force of the passage is ruined, drowned, by the many othet momentary spikes in affect that follow.

- A suddenly deeply affecting passage occurs on p. 52, where we're told, in the body text (written by, and commented on, by Fresán/Melvill in the footnotes), that when Herman's mother suffered from migraines, she had her eight children stand silently around the bed. The narrator at that point has no reason not to stop and consider the strangeness and trauma of that scene, either in the body text or inthe footnotes, but Fresán/Melvill rush on with no acknowledgment, just because the rhythm of inspiration impels him.

- The point of view—focalization, as Genette called it—keeps shifting. At the beginning we're told, in a footnote, that whatever is "in bigger letters" (i.e., in the body text) can be discussed "aloud with acquaintances." The "smaller letters" contain "what I only dare explain to that increasingly difficult to recognize stranger that is me" (p. 27 n. *). Very quickly Fresán disregards the rule he's given to his narrator Melvill, and the footnotes begin to offer parenthetical asides that could easily be in the main text. This is not thematized or acknowledged, which is why it can be read as the product of speed of writing. Most of the body text in this section begins the imaginary life of Allan, told in the third person but in the continuous present as well as the past tense. We follow Allan and guess at his thoughts. But then there are passages of sudden omniscient narrative, for example one in which the young Herman sleeps in his father's arms, and the child's dream "leaps from his head to the head of the father" (p. 34). Changes in focalization are done in many ways, butwhen they veer in this uncertain way they draw attention out of the narrative and back to the author—and at this point we have no choice, I think, but to see him writing at speed, inspired variably from moment to moment, accepting whatever comes in the belief that it is integral to the expressive project.

Fresán may have gotten the idea of inspired writing with minimal editing from Aira, who is thanked at the end. Expressionist painters have the advantage of being able to stop suddenly when the marks are all coherent and strong (as Nolde did), or keep going, over the same canvas, until fully expressive version emergers (as Auerbach did). Novelists have a different sort of challenge: it's necessary to come back to the text in a delicately different frame of mind, neither entirely cold nor blazing hot, but an intermediate mood where it's possible to insert acknowledgments of the inconsistencies that intuition has placed on the page.

Intuitive writing is sloppy by nature, because feeling comes and goes, inspiration blazes up and then goes out. At its best, intuitive writing—done at speed, with minimal stops for transitions or explanations, with nothing on the page that's not delivered by the moment—can be stronger and more expressive than deliberate plotted writing. "Sloppiness" is the word for writing that does not bother to arrange or even acknowledge the inevitable gaps and lapses that result.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Winner of the 2024 Republic of Consciousness Prize, United States and Canada
Finalist for the 2025 Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize

... And I make a last request, almost a plea of that e appended to my father's name that becomes my name: understand him and me as separate parts (invented and dreamed and remembered) of a whole.

Melvill (2024) is Will Vanderhyden's translation of Rodrigo Fresán's original of the same name (2022).

As Fresán recalls, in a (lengthy) afterword, in his The Remembered Part, in Vanderhyden's translation, the narrator criticises the profileration of fictional works about real writers but admits:

And, yes, he'd once fantasized about writing a novella about Herman Melville's father: a beautiful loser, walking across the frozen Hudson River to return to his family and die among them amid deliriums and with his young son seeing it all and taking notes and thinking of the whiteness of the snow and the ice that'd struck down the author of his days and who'd once described him as "very backward in speech and somewhat slow in comprehension" and yet with a gift for understanding "men and things both solid and profound."

The event - the walk across the Hudson by Allan Melvill, in December 1831 is real, and a fever contracted from the after effects of this difficult journey form Manhattan to Albany was to contribute to his death in January 1832 (his widow later adding an 'e' to the family name).

But it is Fresán's fictional thesis that this was the source of the then 12 year old Herman's later "so profound and leviaithinic obsession/fascination with the whitness of all white."

And this is, in a sense, that novella.

Except novellas are not Fresán's style. His Invented Part (the first of the trilogy of which The Remembered Part was the third and final) was maximalist fiction at a level of self-indulgent digression beyond my taste - my review - and I was not inclined to pursue the rest of the trilogy.

But Fresán has said this work was intended to be more focused, a "controlled explosion" after the "Big Bang Bang Bang" of the Trilogy, and the original version came in under 200 pages. Although Fresán has an interesting habit as a writer of adding to his novels, not regarding them as permanent works in progress, publication just a staging point, so that by the time Vanderhyden came to translate it, the work was 50% longer.

The novel is in three parts

The Father and the Son

This first section is ostensibly a fictionalised biography of Allan Melvill, relatively brief but actually expanded and imagined from what we know of his life. But the real novel in the first section takes place in the footnotes, which reveal the biography is told by (or at least annotated by) his son Herman, who adds his own thoughts, and references to the later influence on his own life and work.

Talking of religious texts, the narrator comments:

Books that fit in the palm of the hand and where the lines (of harmonious sound but often enigmatic meaning as only a proclamation of faith in something invisible can be) are commented upon and explained in footnotes of shrunken script marked by a diminutive symbol.*

Adding in a lenghty footnote, in shrunken script (below is only part):

* A script like this that, yes, sorry (not sorry), will present certain difficulty for the reader, interrupting actions or rupturing moods with information that, if only complementary, I deem indispensable and as necessary as the underwater keel that stabilizes and holds up a ship, the sunken thing that keeps the not-sunken thing from sinking. But I would like to think that any of my very few readers would already know and understand the shadowy reaches they're headed for and with whom they're embarking. And the truth is that at this point I can't help thinking as if I were reading and, at the same time, commenting on what I'm reading. In bigger letters, everything that I think that I have no problem at all discussing aloud with acquaintances and strangers alike; and everything that I think about what I think: in smaller letters, what I only dare explain to that increasingly difficult to recognize stranger that is me. What I wrote in my books, in my books that were written and read in both letters at the same time. In all those books that subsequently sold little and not at all and that burned (like a first and so symbolic funeral, a Viking funeral while alive) in a fire at the warehouses of the publisher Harper & Brothers, in 1853...

And this highlights the two issues I had personally with this section. It assumes a familiarity with and subsequent interest in with Herman Melville's life and work I don't particularly have - Fresán is Argentinian, but his work is rooted in US literature, a body of work with which I have generally have limited familarity or affinity.

And the 'shrunken script' used for the footnotes makes this a physically frustrating read - it's not clear to me why the publisher couldn't have used a different rather than a much smaller font. Fresán is clearly inspired by Nabakov's Pnin but the annotations that constitute the real novel are printed, at least in version I've seen, is normal size text.

Glaciology; Or, the Transparency of the Ice

During January 1832, as he succumed to illness, Allan Melvill grew increasingly incoherent. History records a letter sent by his brother Thomas Melvill, Jr. to Lemuel Shaw, Allan's friend and later to be Herman's future father-in-law:

in short my dear sir, Hope, is no longer permitted of his recovery, in the opinion of the attending Physicians and indeed,-oh, how hard for a brother to say!-I ought not to hope it.-for,-in all human probability-he would live, a Maniac!

And the second part is presented as the last delirious words of Allan to, and in the presence of Herman, a rambling through his past but also visions of the future (such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, publised in 1818, but which he claims to have read decades earlier), in part his advice to Herman, and in part a conversation with a "fanpiro" (a neologism combining the Spanish words for ghost and vampire) Nicolás Cueva (which Fresán realised means Nicholas Cage in English, but decided to retain).

This is perhaps closer to the style of the trilogy, as Allan tells Herman:

And I hope that these lists of slightly capricious information regarding the capricious behaviors and variable tonalities of ice don't have a toxic and deforming effect on a mind in formation such as yours. And that they don't cause irreparable damage or constitute the worst of influences as it relates to your mode and style of expressing yourself, verbally or in writing, in a not-too-distant future ...

The Son of the Father

“Children begin as footnotes to their parents, and parents end up being footnotes to their children.”, from the author's 2003 novel Kensington Gardens in Natasha Wimmer's translation, although I line Fresán did not have consciously in mind when he wrote this book.

And here Herman Melville's narration takes over but thankfully in a readable font:

The size of my handwriting suddenly rises and grows and … grows and rises here until it narrows the same dimension and magnitude as the volume of the brief main text that whose feet I was born

Again this contains a blurring of the future (but again confined, conveniently, to our past) with Melville's present, him seeing his own future posthumous reception, but also incidents such as a bar where the denizens are singing songs unknown to him, but all from the Beatles' White Album.

And the account is filled with references to Melville's life and work, although to one unfamilirar with the subtle detail (the Beatles reference above was pointed out in the interview linked below or I would have missed it), it simply felt that cetological and nautical references were rather shoehorned in:

I can’t help but repeatedly construct the most diverse similes and metaphors related to a ship in the book’s margins, on its shores.

But this is both the most relatively conventional and, for me, successful of the sections, providing a moving look at a father-son relationship, Herman trying to reconstruct the figure his father would have liked to be, rewriting the story so the two journeyed over the ice together:

My father, just then and without warning, speaking like an ambassador of his past, awarding me the letter of safe-passage for my future. And I, upon hearing those words, transcribing them here and now in a voice (could the sound of that voice be another of those dispatches from the future?) like the voice of a writer who is not me. A writer who will come after me, a writer who is already coming, but not yet with these words, in one of his books that hasn't yet come into being. A writer with the word Portrait in the title of one of his books, a book I read and in which I admired...

Overall: an author where I can admire his craft, but can't personally fully appreciate the resulting works. And as for novels based on Melville, I can't help feeling Krasznahorkai's duo of The Manhattan Project and Spadework for a Palace, in John Batki's translation, did this much more effectively. 2.5 stars rounded to 3.

Interview

An interview with the author with David Naimon on the Between the Covers podcast with more background information on Fresán's approach.

The publisher - Open Letter

Open Letter—the University of Rochester's nonprofit, literary translation press—is one of only a handful of publishing houses dedicated to increasing access to world literature for English readers. Publishing ten titles in translation each year and running an online literary website called Three Percent, Open Letter searches for works that are extraordinary and influential, works that we hope will become the classics of tomorrow.

Making world literature available in English is crucial to opening our cultural borders, and its availability plays a vital role in maintaining a healthy and vibrant book culture. Open Letter strives to cultivate an audience for these works by helping readers discover imaginative, stunning works of fiction and poetry and by creating a constellation of international writing that is engaging, stimulating, and enduring.

[od1_40reads · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fresán is a writer unconstrained by pretty much anything, whether that be linear time, temporal dimensions, or just straightforward plot. Having completed ‘The Parts Trilogy’, and now this latest work translated into English by the brilliant Will Vanderhyden, I am firmly of the mind that in order to successfully read Fresán, a reader must be fully open to absolutely anything.

He’s not an easy writer to initially grasp. In understanding his work, or at least attempting to, I’ve been helped greatly by listening to him talk, not just about his own work, but about pretty much all literature. In fact it’s when he speaks about (as he also primarily writes about) other writers that things really fall into place. I highly recommend that anyone reading Fresán also listens to him. Seek out podcasts and interviews as fortunately there are plenty out there.

In reading ‘Melvill’ there is no requirement to have read Fresán previously, but those who have will get so much more out of it. ‘The Parts Trilogy’ flows throughout the entirety of this work.

‘Melvill’ then is a hauntingly beautiful book on the relationship between Allan and Herman, father and son, who share narratives that travel through time, and both earthly and spiritual realms. Fathers and sons are central to the book’s main themes, along with Allan Melvill(e)’s journey on foot across the frozen Hudson river in 1831, and the ice of said frozen river, ‘‘a symbol symbolizing everything’’. Ice as symbolism is rife throughout:

“Is ice the substance that the memory is made of or is the memory something you envelope in ice to keep from losing it, to keep from losing the memory, to keep it from melting?”

Ghosts and memories, along with literary references fill these pages:

“Here comes Allan Melvill, my father. Enter Ghost.”

‘Enter Ghost’ here referencing Hamlet (the other great father/son tale), I was particularly moved when Herman speaks posthumously of his own sons:

“There is only one thing worse than the pain of a dead child: the pain of two dead children.” - A line so simple in its creation, but of potentially devastating impact.

‘Melvill’ is a stunning, haunting and difficult work. It’s among my favourite books read this year, though I would advise readers new to Fresán’s English translations, tempted to pick up this first due to it’s less intimating size, to instead be bold and start with ‘The Invented Part’, then to work their way through the trilogy before attempting the deceptively complex ‘Melvill’.

[Darwin8u · Rating 4 out of 5]

God. I loved the prose. Loved the concept.

[Dax · Rating 4 out of 5]

'Melvill' is an oxymoronic (is that a word?) experience in that it's playful and a lot of fun to read, while at the same time being an incredibly slow read. It requires full attention and an inquisitive attitude to fully appreciate. I loved the subtle allusions and pop-culture references. Fresan has an Alvaro Enrique vibe and I'm all here for it. But Fresan also has a thoughtful aspect to his work, in this case regarding the father-son relationship. Metaphors and symbolism abound. This is a book that can be read and re-read a dozen times. I want to read more Fresan, particularly 'The Invented Part' trilogy, but I would like to return to this sooner rather than later. I'm glad to see this on the RoC US/Canada short-list and it would be a worthy winner. Excellent.

[Wes Allen]

The latest episode of Literary Ramblings focuses in on Fresán's bizarre "biography" on Melville. Listen here: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/show...

[Diego Passamonte · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cada vez que termino un libro de Rodrigo Fresán aparece el vacío. Un vacío raro, repleto de placeres y de ausencia. Melvill lo volvió a generar. Un libro emocional, sublime con guiños a sus libros anteriores y al universo Fresán. La historia contada, escrita y re escrita de un hijo y su padre. Eso y mucho, mucho más...

[Roberto Roganovich · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fresán es inclasificable en la literatura argentina. En un momento, Herman (¿o Alan? ya no recuerdo) habla de sí mismo, se interpreta a sí mismo como una isla. Fresán es un poco eso: una isla. Es tan isla, además, que es totalmente asimilable o totalmente expulsivo. Siento que no hay términos medios para quien se acerca a su literatura.

Hay dos vampiros en la literatura nacional que me parecen hermosísimos. Uno es el de Ricardo Romero en El conserje y la eternidad, nouvelle hermosísima; el otro es Nico C., que aparece solo en el segundo capítulo, aunque con un rol relevante, en la historia de Alan y su Grand Tour.

Y el final, irrelevante en términos de estructura, igual que Asimov en La última pregunta: sea.

[Gianni · Rating 5 out of 5]

”Da quando ho cominciato a scrivere ho sofferto, con malcelato piacere, dell’impossibilità di distillare i concetti più semplici in una o due frasi. Da sempre ho goduto di un’infiammazione dei sensi, di una dilatazione delle pupille e di un’espansione della prosa nel tentativo di narrare L’Assoluto, e di raggiungere così la profondità abissale dove tutto è simbolo di tutto”
Fresan immagina che così la pensi Melville, ma vale anche per lui: si esce stremati da questa lirica affabulazione che non lascia respirare, da ciò che non è una biografia ma potrebbe, ipoteticamente, anche esserlo, tra le infinite possibilità che la letteratura può dare: ”Coloro che hanno inteso i miei primi libri, in parte autobiografici, come le esagerazioni di un bugiardo, e i libri che sono arrivati dopo come l’autentica e indiscutibile prova della mia follia. Ma non sono stato io a mentirgli: sono stati loro ad avermi creduto.
Fa ridere: nei libri solitamente si lodano le invenzioni che riescono a dare un’impressione di realtà e la realtà che assomiglia a qualcosa di inventato; e maledetti siate tutti voi, lettori correnti di romanzi normali, vi auguro una buona e confortevole traversata.”

[Bhaskar Thakuria · Rating 4 out of 5]

And there I go: to one of those taverns, in the middle of my ocean, of my true sweet dwelling place. And then, later, back in the bitter harbor of my home, sitting down at the table as if toppling off the mainmast. And there, filling with potatoes a mouth that never stops opening to blaspheme, attacking a plate of crabs, and answering occasional letters to near strangers, where I explain that "You are young (as I said), but I am not anymore; and with my years, and with my disposition, or better, with my constitution, one ceases to worry about anything but good feelings. Life is so short, and so irrational and ridiculous (looked at from a certain point of view), that one never knows what to do with it unless that is...well, you finish the sentence. P.S. I am not mad."

Rodrigo Fresan manages to give the Melvills a voice- and in doing so manages to give a glimpse of the inner lives of revered American author, Herman Melville, and his father- the explorer Allan Melville. He recreates an image of Herman as a kid who sits at the deathbed of his father and listen to him recounting the days of his youth and his travels, his subsequent fate, and also about his most fascinating journey- the crossing on foot of the frozen Hudson river. At the same time he launches out in his novel a sort of inquiry as to whether the great fictional byproducts of Herman's literary journey had in its source a paternal legacy of experiencing firsthand the recounting of the endless travails of his father.

We also get a glimpse of Herman as a grown-up man who seeks to destroy the critical hypothesis which describes, as an analogy with artistic distemper, the publication of his gothic romance, Pierre: or, The Ambiguities, as an act of monstrous morning hangover without the benefit of the previous night's drunkenness (a verdict that was then generously ascribed to the masterpiece Moby-Dick or, The Whale). The above excerpt is justified by the unending diatribes of the great author in support of his second novel that was dismissed by the critics as just a stolid exercise in self-indulgence.

As an afterword to this wonderful text Fresan says in Melvill: "a good number of the names and places and people and dates are real, but many of their actions and thoughts are not."

In the midst of all these the voice of the literary architect is unmistakable. Here again, as in his previous works we get to see Fresan the critic and the referential maniac endlessly making his way through a maze of literary allusions and references to reach the final culmination of a text where the boundary between fiction and literary biography/criticism tends to get blurred.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED for lovers of avant-garde literary fiction and classical references.....

[Giovanni Spadolini · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ho finalmente letto tutto questo strazio di libro, spegnendo il cervello a partire dal primo quarto.
Ovviamente è un testo ignobile, tanto Fresán quanto chi lo ha pubblicato e tradotto dovrebbero essere banditi per sempre dal mondo dell'editoria e andare a raccogliere pomodori sotto il sole di agosto.

La pazienza di chi legge viene messa continuamente alla prova non solo perchè non si capisce quasi nulla e quel poco che si capisce è del tutto vacuo, ma anche per i continui ammiccamenti alle DUE cose che Fresán sembra conoscere di Melville:

Chiamatemi Herman. O forse, scusate, meglio ignorare fin dal principio la presunta ironia di questo suggerimento autoreferenziale.

«Poche volte ho conosciuto qualcuno di così acuto, che abbia qualcosa da dire a questo mondo... Mi abbandonerai o no?», «Preferirei di no» ha risposto Nico C., enfatizzando dolcemente la negazione, con quell'accento così suo.

Una storia la cui prima e luminosa frase, come quella Luce che fu il primo giorno, protrebbe essere Call me...

«Vivi la tua vita pienamente, Herman. Preferire di no è un errore.»

E non entro nemmeno nel merito del fanpiro e del Super Moby Dick dallo Spazio Esteriore.

[Borja Jared · Rating 3 out of 5]

Por momentos es un libro excepcional. La primera parte me parece magnífica. El diálogo a través de las notas a pie de página es genial. En la segunda parte juega con la locura del padre moribundo en su lecho de muerte y cómo el hijo va escribiendo lo que el padre de alguna forma le dicta. En esta segunda parte Fresán ya nos lleva por caminos difíciles de transitar, con una prosa complicada y muchas veces redundante. La tercera parte es la "reunión" de Herman con su padre, al final de los días del escritor.
Un libro denso, complejo, con párrafos increíbles junto a otros redundantes y casi incomprensibles.

[Dustin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was really excited about this one. Metafictional Herman Melville, influenced by Borges and Nabokov? The book opens with one of the greatest pages of epigraphs ever. This should be right in my lane, but... it just never hit me like I hoped. Rambling and too often boring. Fresan is a good writer. He's super smart and seems to have read everything, but this one didn't land for me.

[Guillermo · Rating 5 out of 5]

«Lo que te convierte a ti en escritor y a mí en escrito»

[LindaJ^ · Rating 3 out of 5]

I decided to attempt to read the books on this year's long list for the Republic of Consciousness Prize US and Canada. This one made it not only to the short list but also won the prize. It is an interesting book but I only made it just halfway through when I had to take a break from it as I could only read small chunks at a time and I wanted to read something more enjoyable and fast paced! Now I cannot bring myself to go back, so I am going to abandon it.

The structure of this book is challenging, as it has footnotes that may be as long as the text. On Kindle, the font of footnote and text is the same but I think the footnote font is smaller on paper. While I did not have the small challenge, I did have the challenge of remember the text the footnote was a reference for. I may not even have what was going on correct. I think the main text is about Herman Mellville's father and that it is Mellville that is writing about his father. In the footnotes, Mellville, as I remember, tells about what he as a child was doing during the time that the main text is talking about what his father was doing (which is sometimes in the present text).

I am sure I will not return to this book. I will rate it 3 stars, reflecting my ambiguous thinking about it.

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Recommended for ... those interested in the life of Herman Melville. It is not enough to just be a fan of his books. Given that, stylistically, the book feels like a more accessible David Foster Wallace, MELVILL is wildly niche. Luckily, I happen to fall within its Venn diagram. I loved it. Though, results will vary.

I am obsessed with Herman Melville, and I am becoming obsessed with Rodrigo Fresán after reading Melvill.

The book is a Melville nerd's dream: wildly detailed, chock full of lore (both established and invented), insanely specific (but borderline unnecessary) tangents. It is positively drowning in minutia.

It will appeal to almost no one LOL.

But Fresán. Fresán! What a writer. His command of language is truly next level, with that rare ability to craft a sentence that goes on and on and on while never lacking control and never losing momentum. It's extraordinarily entertaining at the sentence-by-sentence level. I'm in as much awe of translator Will Vanderhyden, who is in the midst of translating Fresan's entire catalogue. What an absolute gift, on both fronts.

How good is this combo? In 2018 his translation of Fresán's The Invented Part won the Best Translated Book Award for fiction.

Like any work of Melville worth its salt, Melvill will be under appreciated in its own time. How fitting :)

[Laura Freeland · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am not a fan of Moby Dick. But I had to read Melvill after hearing David Naimon’s interview with Rodrigo Fresan on Between the Covers podcast. Fresan is such a charming, smart, funny individual - you want to read whatever he writes

I can’t say I now love Moby Dick after reading Melvill, but I do think I will tackle Moby Dick again.

[Geoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing novel. Serves as an exploration of Herman Melville and his writings as well as a meditation on writing fiction. There’s an exuberance to the writing that made me smile.

[Mason MB]

Objet petit e

[Alberto Palumbo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Qui lo dico e qui lo nego: non è un libro per tutti, ma se avete coraggio abbastanza da leggerlo vi darà tante soddisfazioni.

[Nolan Skochdopole · Rating 5 out of 5]

"What I've served in your glass, Allan ... Uh ... How to explain it? Nico has told me you're an expert in the procurement and selling of luxury items and exquisite merchandise. Well, what you're about to taste is a liquor but also a fragrance ... And a place ... And a remembrance and a dream and an invention ..."

[Ethan Philion · Rating 1 out of 5]

I liked some of the writing about the “ice” and there a few segments I enjoyed, but overall I couldn’t stand this book and frequently I wanted to scream out of frustration. The writing style did not work for me at all—the consecutive lists where each sentence/idea doesn’t really build on the previous or add to anything are mind numbing. This book is absurdly navel-gazy (I usually don’t like that as a criticism for a book but I don’t know what else to call it) in a way that just feels pointless. Maybe if I was super into Herman Melville I would have enjoyed it more, but even then I think the writing style just doesn’t work for me at all.

[Pablo]

Fresán vuelve a Jardines de Kensington del revés: lo que aquella era una novela de un hijo perdido, esta es la novela de un padre perdido. El tiempo ha pasado. La novela es nabokoviana (la primera parte es admirable, un diálogo a lo Pálido Fuego entre padre e hijo en las notas al pie) para ser finalmente testamentaria. Todas las novelas de Fresán han buscado capturar el misterio de la lectura, con una originalisima y regresiva visión alucinada, pero aquí quizás lo único que se empiece a vislumbrar es el acabamiento. El modo (y el tema, en cierto sentido) es el tiempo.

[Cameron Markuson]

This book sort of sets itself up to fail, and basically met my expectations.

[Daniel KML · Rating 5 out of 5]

I believe that Melvill—by Argentinean writer Rodrigo Fresán—is the kind of book that many of my fellow Goodreads friends would appreciate.
What initially might appear to be a historical novel about Herman Melville and the influence his slightly manic father had on him turns out to be a fascinating work about reading and writing, the mysteries surrounding the call to become a writer, and how works of art can transcend generations and our finite human existence.

Melvill is also an experimental and adventurous novel without coming across as overly intellectual—though it demands the reader's constant attention (reading Moby Dick is also advisable). It is provocative in both format and content and solid in the system it proposes to create.

The Long Form by Kate Briggs takes a similar approach, using a rather simple plot to discuss the novel form. Melvill also reminded me of the literary system created by Gerald Murnane in his body of work—original and peculiar, yet consistent (and not far-fetched) with the rules it establishes.

Overall, it’s a refreshing and stimulating work—the type of novel that keeps my literary heart alive.


Vocación que no es otra cosa que la profesionalización de esta tan misteriosa como oficiosa zona del cerebro en la que todos, de una manera u otra, decidimos cómo contar lo que no ocurrió, cómo no contar lo que ocurrió, o cómo contar lo que pudo o debió haber ocurrido mientras se intenta regular el rumbo y la velocidad de las cosas con que a uno se le ocurren, a veces sintiéndose almirante y otras grumete.

A vocation that’s nothing but the professionalization of this equally mysterious and officious part of the brain we all use, in one way or another, to decide how to tell the story of what didn’t happen, how not to tell the story of what did happen, or how to tell the story of what could or should have happened, while attempting to control the direction and speed of things as they occur to us, sometimes feeling the admiral and others the cabin boy. — in Will Vanderhyden's translation.

[Johnathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extremely weird, but weird in a comforting way - it makes me happy that there are still weirdos out there writing their weird books and weirdos like me who still buy them.

The book is written from the point of view of Herman Melville, after he has written his major books and seemingly retired from the writing life. It's largely about his relationship with his father, who died when Herman was still a child. The beginning chapters, especially, abound with long footnotes, and the novel is rather difficult to get into, because it's not immediately clear who is talking - Melville, his father, a combination, neither? I'm pretty sure now that it's just Melville, but it is confusing. Fresán writes in a very convincingly Melvillian manner, expansive and digressive and free with parentheses.

I found some of the self-referentialisms to be a bit much, and the book becomes rather a slog at times. It would be nice to have a few signposts. Where are we in the later chapters, other than Melville's head? Like physically, in space and time? It's really hard to say, and a bit more concreteness would have helped to keep the book from bogging down in its own quirkiness.

The language, however, is delicious - consider Melville's father on his deathbed:

a consumed and consummate Now: Allan Melvill tied to the bed. A living model of an almost spectral dead nature for whom the physical world of solid objects seems displaced, slipping away, floating in an ether of blind visions, under those stars where a whole slithering universe of serpentine creatures hiss in one undulating voice.

[Jeffrey Wright · Rating 5 out of 5]

A powerful exegesis on Herman Melville and his father Allan Melvill who died bound and raving before his nine year old son. Fresán's novel is a towering investigation of the relationship between the two. Reimagining the father's failures as filial gifts, Herman channels his tortured pater's romantic ravings. The father becomes a whale, and "I am his Jonah."
Not a normal page turner, (the book mimics Melville's convoluted fluidity) but what an astounding achievement!
Despair and delight illuminate the pages. Redolent with radiant references to the Grand Tour, philosophical in nature, and a heartbreaking testament to devotion, this one will thrill history buffs with its dazzling vocabulary and exotic references. Likewise, fans of great literature will enjoy it on multiple levels. A unique and delicious achievement. Makes the author of Moby Dick and Billy Budd come alive.