Andrew's Reviews > Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land

After three years of intermittent reading, I've finally finished the complete* poetry and prose of Mr. Herman Melville. Forget anything you've heard about Mardi, Moby-Dick, Pierre, or Confidence-Man being impenetrable and unreadable. The only truly unreadable one is this grotesque, never-ending bog of misery. Even the two 5 star reviews currently on this page concede that Clarel is "tedious" and "painfully unwieldy."

Out of almost 500 pages, there are about 10 pages worth of actual brilliancy. By far the worst ratio in the entire Melville canon. The title character spends the whole poem questioning his Christian faith, and in the end, after several other characters have died, he's right back where he started, not only emotionally, but even literally! What a waste.

Nathaniel Hawthorne once famously wrote that Melville "can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief." In Clarel, Melville took an excruciating 18,000 lines to say what Hawthorne managed to pithily summarize in only nine words!


*excluding the posthumously published poetry. Maybe some night when I'm really bored...