what even

This blew my mind! It is the most elusive book I have yet read.

Read as part of the Slate Trumpcast book club. I needed to give this more attention than I was willing to give, but it got very repetitive.

A long overdue re-reading of Melville's strangest, darkest novel -- the last he published in his lifetime. This edition features an introduction and extensive annotations by H Bruce Franklin who does an impressive job teasing out the novel's many themes, references, games, and double-meanings. This is a novel one should approach with care -- it is, as the title would suggest, filled with tricks and disguises. Melville's sentences are usually clearer and more colloquial than those of his contemporaries but here many of his sentences are filled with mis-direction, like little shell-games. I am still working out much of what Melville is up to in The Confidence Man -- what I do know is that there is much brilliance to be found throughout. The last chapter is some of Melville's finest writing: evocative, unsettling, funny, and beautiful.

Oh, Melville. This is a fascinating interrogation into various philosophies. Melville especially questions the limits of your "basic" Christianity (haha, I know, whatever that is!). It's always helpful to have the Norton annotations, and I think it was particularly helpful to have taken the Melville class! Here, Melville deals with his common preoccupations of why there is evil in the world and the difference between a person's label and how they undermine or support that label. It's a window into the 19th century but still reflects ideas we still think about.