Nicholas Goldberg: In defense of long, bug-crushing, Kleenex-box sized novels
The man who wrote this novel is also one of the world’s top crime writers.
What you’re about to read is not a book review. Nor is it an analysis of my own work. Rather, it is an interview. This man is the best crime writer in our time.
The title of the book is “Moby Dick,” by Herman Melville. It’s not really a novel, but an epic in the manner of a saga.
It’s a story about a ship, named The Pequod, and about some men named Queequeg. The book is not really about sea. Nor is it a book about the sea. Rather, it’s a book about what goes on in our imaginations when we are in a state of heightened awareness.
It’s about what we do to imagine ourselves at all.
A few years ago, when he was in his late sixties, an editor of mine gave me a copy of “Moby Dick” to read. When the book is fully immersed in the mind of Melville, it’s like nothing else I’d read since The Hobbit.
I’d found that I needed only a few pages to absorb the whole book. That’s because the book is about men and women who are not really who they think they are. Melville’s characters are not what the reader expects.
The book takes place in a world that is not ours. It’s not a story of our world. It is a story of another world.
What you’re about to read is a book review.
Why am I giving you a book review on this blog? Well, it’s about books. It’s
