Melvill

Starred review from August 15, 2024
A brilliant evocation, by Argentinian novelist Fres�n, of the star-crossed family history of a canonical American writer. "Call me Herman." Such a commandment could come from only one writer, Herman Melville, who stands at the center of Fres�n's narrative. Occupying much of that space, too, albeit in sometimes spectral form, is Melville's father, Allan Melvill (the-e a typo that his son, the victim of a bureaucrat's pen, stuck with, even as, later in the novel, he notes ruefully that his obituary inHarper's Monthly Magazine, where several of his stories appeared, will render his name as Henry). Allan, born to a Scottish family famed for "swords and shields and maces brandished in the name of savage monarchs whose castles were just giant stones," is frequently revisited at a climacteric moment, when, desperately poor, he walks across an iced-over Hudson River to return to his starving family. It's an image that haunts the grown-up Herman, who, Fres�n conjectures, cast his father as a confidence man on a paddle wheeler, a lowly sailor on a whaling ship, an indifferent clerk who refuses to do his job. "It turns out to be almost as exhausting and distressing to trace his downward spiral as, I suppose, it was for my father to know himself pursued and persecuted," Herman sighs. Fres�n imagines Melville's life as a quiet repudiation of his father's, who was so proud that he refused to allow his wife, Herman's mother, to borrow money from her aristocratic family. In the end, though, Allan accompanies his son's every waking moment and haunts his dreams: "The ice is the unknown," Herman, that great explorer of mysterious places and mores, says. Fres�n's fictional evocation of Melville's youth is as convincingly realized as Frederick Busch'sThe Night Inspector (2000), which neatly bookends it. An elegant, meditative story about storytelling--for lives are, Fres�n writes, "really, books of stories."

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Starred review from September 2, 2024
Argentine writer Fresan (The Invented Part) focuses his visionary latest on the inner life of author Herman Melville and the exploits of his tormented father, Allan. In the first section, set in December 1831, 12-year-old Herman sits by Allan’s deathbed as the elder Melvill (the second “e” was added later) recounts his illustrious revolutionary roots in Boston, promising marriage to the fetching Maria Gansevoort, ruinous career as a merchant, and mystical final adventure, in which he walks across the frozen Hudson River and hears “messages seeming to come from the Beyond.” Herman faithfully records it all—but cannot resist scribbling copious footnotes that embellish, interrupt, and underscore Allan’s narrative. In the book’s second part, Allan speaks for himself, describing his time in Venice, where he encountered Nicolás Cueva, a “pale young man with white hair” who claims to be undead and imparts forbidden knowledge, prefiguring the subject matter of Herman’s novels. The magisterial final act returns to Herman, who narrates his adventures among sailors and cannibals, lambastes his critics, and reunites with his father’s ghost. The narrative gestures at the kind of ever-expanding realm of imagination that the great author himself incarnated, and the kind Fresan’s Herman prophesies: “A book (a pure style of book, a book of pure style) where many things would end so many others could begin.” This is a masterpiece.