The ConfidenceMan Annotated His Masquerade edition by Herman Melville Literature Fiction eBooks
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*This Book is annotated (it contains a detailed biography of the author).
*An active Table of Contents has been added by the publisher for a better customer experience.
*This book has been checked and corrected for spelling errors.
The Confidence-Man His Masquerade is the ninth book and final novel by American writer Herman Melville, first published in New York in 1857. The book was published on April 1, presumably the exact day of the novel's setting. The Confidence-Man portrays a Canterbury Tales–style group of steamboat passengers whose interlocking stories are told as they travel down the Mississippi River toward New Orleans. According to scholar Robert Milder its reputation has been rising "Long mistaken for a flawed novel, the book is now admired as a masterpiece of irony and control, though it continues to resist interpretive consensus."
The ConfidenceMan Annotated His Masquerade edition by Herman Melville Literature Fiction eBooks
Melville himself is something of an acquired taste and even among those who appreciate him, The Confidence-Man is something of an acid test. A dark carnival set aboard a Mississippi riverboat, Melville gives us no less than a disguise-shifting Satan to point up our human foibles, gullibilities, cruelties, and weaknesses, economic, social and religious. Wandering and episodic, it reads more like a casebook than a novel, but Melville offers up a master class in nuance, irony, infolded and serial contingencies, and nearly straight-faced mischievousness. This may seem a sort of theoretical fun--a sort of philosophical stick-figure puppet show--but it is a remarkable text, just (and this may be the deal-breaker) not very rich in the conventional pleasures of the novel. Doomed from the start, Melville's last novel has been assured, however long it has taken, of a devoted cult following. Count me in.Product details
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The ConfidenceMan Annotated His Masquerade edition by Herman Melville Literature Fiction eBooks Reviews
Do not buy this book unless you can read super tiny print with ease!
Otherwise you will need a magnifying glass.
It’s ridiculous
Just re-read Herman Meliville's The Confidence Man His Masquerade. Swindlers and fast-talkers on a river boat on the Mississippi around 1900. Intricate plot draws the reader in, hoping to avoid being fooled. In the end, we're all fools. Always a favorite, I read again on vacation, amazed by how relevant it is.
After Herman Melville's tales of mountainous waves, disease, apparitions, murders, suicides, cannabalism, tropical storms, tsunamis, hallucinations, lightning strikes, hangings, volcanic eruptions, starvation, giant whales and every form of terror possible on the high seas and land, "The Confidence Man" is Melville's most violent work.
It begins with an April day, the first, "April Fool's Day" on a paddle-wheeled river boat heading downstream from St. Louis, Missouri to New Orleans, Louisiana. The river is wide, 6 kilometers (3.7 miles) at certain points, but a river boat is generally thought to be a reassuring form of travel.
This is not the case, not once in the 45 chapters which follow. The concentration of psychological violence is so intense that the reader is unaware of its insidious presence which manifests itself continually in its different disguises.
In Chapter 14, in a brief aside, Melville gives the reader a kind of passepartout to his novel, when he describes the first stuffed platypus from Australia, the so-called "duck-billed beaver", which many naturalists refused to recognize as a separate species and preferred to conclude that the bill had been ably glued on.
In a letter to his friend, Nathaniel Hawthorne, in 1851, Melville writes "Let any clergyman try to preach the Truth from its very stronghold, the pulpit, and they would ride him out of his church on his own pulpit bannister."
Obviously for many this is a totally unacceptable view of the human race. Incomprehension and
denial are natural defensive reactions. But considering that 153 years have passed since the
publication of "The Confidence Man" and considering the accumulated evidence we have at hand, this prophetic novel provides the ONLY credible conclusive appraisal of the human condition.
Melville catapulted me into another time through his colorful, descriptive language--I had to look up words used in what is to me an archaic, 19th Century delivery. I may have to read this one twice to better absorb the subtle, at times comical play of con artists hustling money or approval from targets on the boat trip down the Mississippi. Enjoyable.
Embarking from St Louis on a Mississippi riverboat named Fidèle (Faithful) two hand written signs are on display. On one a Christ like deaf mute writes lines from Corinthians like "Charity thinketh no evil" and "Charity believeth all things" and on the other a barber not wishing to give credit writes "NO TRUST". A line from The Merchant of Venice comes to mind "The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose" because the deaf mute holds up his sign filled with scriptural tolerance right beside a placard offering a reward for the capture of the Confidence man. The deaf mute "went forward, seating himself in a retired spot on the forecastle, nigh the foot of a ladder there leading to a deck above, up and down which ladder some of the boatmen, in discharge of their duties, were occasionally going." and he goes to sleep. This Jacob's ladder signals us to possible otherworldly access to the boat and as we know angels ascend and descend Jacob's ladder a fallen fellow of their kin might have made his way onto the boat via this ladder and now this Jacob sleeping at the foot of it is ready to assume successive avatars of the Confidence man. Jacob in Genesis was a trickster and it being April fools day the Confidence man takes on many a masquerade as he tries to persuade people on the riverboat to have confidence. At minimum Melville in this novel has given us a comedic Mississippi boat ride on the nature of illusion and trust and a scathing critique of mid nineteenth century America. The Confidence man as the crippled slave, Black Guinea, catches pennies in his mouth he assumes complex disguises as representatives of various charities--the Seminole Widows and Orphans Fund--the inventor of the Protean Chair that relaxes all infirmities by its flexibility, including infirmities of the tormented conscience, a naturopath herb doctor, and a representative of the Philosophical Intelligence Office. Through all of this his profits are minuscule--a dollar or three, a shave on credit, and so forth. His triumphs are the granting of confidence in him, not the money. At the close of the novel the last avatar of the Confidence man, the Cosmopolitan, is talking to an old man but the old man is trying to find a life preserver something he has never seen. The Cosmopolitan gives him a wooden stool chamber pot and tells him that it is a life preserver. He humorously tells him "I think that in case of a wreck, barring sharp-pointed timbers, you could have confidence in that stool for a special providence." In a book rife with symbolism this penultimate symbol typifies the main theme of the novel Look to what you place confidence in or you might be left holding a chamber pot believing it to be a life preserver.
Melville himself is something of an acquired taste and even among those who appreciate him, The Confidence-Man is something of an acid test. A dark carnival set aboard a Mississippi riverboat, Melville gives us no less than a disguise-shifting Satan to point up our human foibles, gullibilities, cruelties, and weaknesses, economic, social and religious. Wandering and episodic, it reads more like a casebook than a novel, but Melville offers up a master class in nuance, irony, infolded and serial contingencies, and nearly straight-faced mischievousness. This may seem a sort of theoretical fun--a sort of philosophical stick-figure puppet show--but it is a remarkable text, just (and this may be the deal-breaker) not very rich in the conventional pleasures of the novel. Doomed from the start, Melville's last novel has been assured, however long it has taken, of a devoted cult following. Count me in.
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