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Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.3
EAN num: 9780810102668
ISBN number: 0810102668
Label: Northwestern University Press
Manufacturer: Northwestern University Press
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 435
Printing Date: February 01, 1972
Publishing house: Northwestern University Press
Sale Popularity Level: 2476914
Studio: Northwestern University Press
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Product Description:
HarperCollins is proud to present this controversial masterpiece of American literature, now restored to its original form and illuminated with 30 full-colour pictures by Maurice Sendak.
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Rated by buyers 
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Of all the colics, save me from the melloncholics!
Says the landlord of the Black Swan, summing up his lack of understanding of young Master Pierre. I am sure most readers will agree with him. Could Melville really have expected to earn money with this hotchpotch of styles in a plot that is full of contradictory elements? Hard to believe.
The melodrama in a nutshell: a 19 y old idle semi-orphaned princeling of New England aristocracy, with dubiously close ties to overbearing mother and sanctified illusions about dead father, is confronted with the existence of an illegitimate half-sister. He wants to put things right by her without offending mother and without desecrating father's memory. He has the absurd idea to pretend that the new sister is his wife, upsetting his fiancee as well as getting kicked out and disinherited by his mother. Attempts at building a new existence in New York meet resistance by reality. Happy-ends not included.
Dialogue chapters are written in antiquated language. Chapters ruminating about the moral issues at stake are reminiscent of some of the more boring products of world literature. (A Swedish Italian around here compared it to Goethe's Elective Affinities; that is mean, but justified, however only for some chapters!) Chapters describing social relations and psychological observations are however frequently written in a direct and efficient prose, that is Melville at his best. The satirical tone in the social chapters is at times reminiscent of Dickens.
The ambiguities of the title refer to the multiple taboo breakers in the relationships among the protagonists. Much of the scandal is hidden in obscure language, and most likely needed to be. Melville was declared mad anyway by critics at the time. Had he been outspoken he might have been expelled to the South Pacific. I don't normally believe in overdone psychological interpretations of such texts, but I am sure that many different and contradictory conclusions can be drawn from the goings on among Pierre, his mother, his fiancee, his sister, his (male) cousin.
I think it is nonsense to rate such a book as if it was a new bestseller in the market. As the system insists on a rating, I give Pierre 5 stars in recognition for the broad exposure to question marks that he gives me.
Rated by buyers -
It's hard to enjoy Pierre. The style is reminiscent of the effect of perfume on a seasick sailor. I can't say that I enjoyed it myself, nor can I make much of a case for its significance in a world rather well-stocked with significant books. I'd urge any reader to use her/his reading lifetime judiciously by 'perusing' all of Melville's other novels and tales first. But there are some people who admire Pierre; the review here on Amazon, by D. Cloyce Smith, makes as good a case for the novel as any I've encountered, and in a few dozen words.
Even Melville's later novel The Confidence Man, which I admire strongly, is a shipboard narration - on a Mississippi river-boat. Melville's only supreme creation on land is the short story Bartleby the Scrivener. Like a sailour wobbling on his sea legs on a long pier, Melville wobbles through Pierre with a slight suspicion that nausea, caused by surfeit, is closing around us. Perhaps that sense of vertigo really is a premonition of 20th Century literature - of the loss of simple diversion with a measure of instruction as the main cargo of novels.
Anyone who has read Robert Musil's endless existential novel The Man Without Qualities should have no trouble recognizing that Melville was sailing toward the same sea of anxiety. But there's a more obvious connection to German literature, to Goethe!, and especially to Goethe's novel Elective Affinities. If, as his biographers claim, Melville wrote Pierre under the delusion that he would find a broader, feminine reading public with it, then the sucess of Goethe and of Goethe's imitators in England must have been the stimulus.
And there you have three-in-one, three novels that I will grudgingly admit to have "greatness thrust upon them" - Elective Affinities, Pierre, and Man Without Qualities - all three without which I think you can enjoy a long life of reading and nonetheless die fulfilled.
Rated by buyers 
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I found this to be a much better Book Club selection than just a classic read. It is the tragic story of a young man who is naive in the world and his life quickly dissipates into ruin. Herman Melville published this novel a year after Moby Dick. I would not necessarily recommend it, but I thought it was an interesting work, especially if you are interested in the career of Melville.
Rated by buyers -
The thing about Bartleby, the Scrivener is that it makes you want to read everything else Melville wrote. Right now I'm about half way through Pierre; or, The Ambiguities and think it an immensely satisfying layer cake so far. When I'm finished I hope to go fishing. Apropos of which, great bolshy yarblockos to Clifton Fadiman, who wrote the following paragraph in an introduction to Moby Dick round about 1941:
"A pessimism as profound as Melville's, if not pathological--and his was not--can exist only in a man who, whatever his gifts, does not posess that of humor. There is much pessimism in Shakespeare but with it goes a certain sweetness, a kind of radiance. His bad men--Macbeth, Iago--may be irretrievable, but the world itself is not irretrievable. This sense of balance comes from the fact that Shakespeare has humor, even in the plays of the later period. Melville had none. For proof, reread Chapter 100, a labored, shrill, and inept endeavor at laughter. Perhaps I should qualify these strictures, for there is a kind of vast, grinning, unjolly, sardonic humour in him at times--Ishmael's very first encounter with Queequeg is an example. But this humour is bilious, not sanguine, and has no power to uplift the heart."
Is it me or is this just a bit too saucy and overbold? Fadiman was a noted intellectual but was obviously unafraid of making a right eejit of himself--can you beat the blinkered quality of his indictment? Talk about a blind spot! That's the trouble with introductions to novels, they're right there in front, always getting in your way, distracting you with their gibberish. Luckily there's no introduction in my copy of Pierre so I was able to proceed directly to the very first page unmolested. The story of Pierre Glendinning is straightforward enough but it unfolds amid a vast and stunningly considered narration that is for me the novel's chief delight. Here's what strikes me at this point: Melville swallowed with obvious relish the Classics, the King James Version of the Bible and most of Shakespeare and then brung them all back up again in a glorious nineteenth-century American amalgam. I'm practically certain that this is some of the most capaciously vivid and readable English I have ever encountered, the type of prose D. H. Lawrence wished he could type but was too blotto with hormones to actually type coherently on his typewriter. Forget everything you've ever read or heard about this novel--the critical response since its very first appearance in 1852 has been for the most part laughably inept and spineless--and just start right in. Believe me, if you're a certain type of reader you will be well pleased. Would it help if I told you that the manservant in Saddle-Meadows is named Dates? Or the local clergyman Falsgrave? Perhaps not. Getting back to Bartleby though for a minute, what a peach that is. Funny and poignant and mysterious. When I finished it a couple of weeks ago I went out on my bicycle and did a victory lap round the neighbourhood, sealing my exultant passage with a cigarette which I actually smoked while awheel. Bliss that was. When you smoke on a bicycle the whole world is your ashtray!
Rated by buyers -
"Pierre" is perhaps Melville's most difficult and challenging novel--and that's saying something. Despairing over his inability to support his family, Melville began writing a book designed to be popular--a counterpoint to the sensational novels written and read by contemporary women, using inspiration from French romances and even from Hawthorne's novels. Wavering between psychological melodrama and social satire, Melville ultimately increased the book's length by half again, incorporating his rage against the literary world by adding a subplot about a young man's desperate struggle to become a writer.
The stumbling points for most readers are the novel's opaque prose, the "thees and thous" of its antiquated dialogue, and the labyrinthine hodgepodge of a plot. But the density is broken by colloquial asides, sparkling sarcasm, and an occasional passage that approaches Dickensian mirth, such as Melville's description of the "Preposterous Mrs. Tartan!" and her undercover attempts to play matchmaker between Pierre and her daughter: "Once, and only once, had a dim suspicion passed through Pierre's mind, that Mrs. Tartan was a lady thimble-rigger, and slyly rolled the pea."
Behind the mask of the prose, however, is a modernist--even scandalous--story of a young, somewhat deluded man whose nihilistic descent leads to his destruction. Engaged to Lucy Tartan, Pierre adores his mother (their make-believe brother-sister relationship is almost creepy in its amorous undertones) and worships the memory of his long-dead father. This idyllic world is shattered by a missive from a woman, Isabel, who claims to be his half-sister--a claim supported by a more-than-passing resemblance to a portrait of his father. Complicating matters are his romantic feelings for this alleged half-sister.
Convincing himself that he is choosing honor over duty, he breaks off his engagement and flees to Manhattan with Isabel, taking along a local woman who had been disgraced by an out-of-wedlock tryst. Disowned by his mother and cut off from his family fortune, Pierre finds shelter for this odd trio among bohemian neighbors in a dilapidated part of town. His finances slowly evaporating, Pierre struggles to support them by writing a novel. And then, just when the plot can barely handle another twist, his estranged fiancee Lucy shows up at their doorstep.
To go any further would spoil the fun for the reader. Yet even such a basic plot summary omits some memorable and extraordinary scenes and sketches: his very first meeting with Isabel, the near-riot that greets them during their very first night in Manhattan, the eccentric philosopher who refuses to put his scholarly brilliance into written form.
Adultery, incest, madness, murder, and suicide--all the ingredients of a bleak nineteenth-century melodrama are wrapped in archaic language and modern themes. In her life of Melville, Robertson-Lorant calls "Pierre" "a narrative nervous breakdown" that is a "minefield" for biographers. It's also a goldmine; in no other work does Melville more clearly ridicule his critics, his friends and family, and even himself. The weird universe of "Pierre" is not the place to start if you've never read Melville, but it's certainly where you should go if you want better to understand his life and works.
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