The Confidence-Man

This is Herman Melville's last strange novel and it is obvious why, a very nebulous plot doesn't help. A Mississippi steamboat leisurely floating down the river, picking up and disembarking passengers along the way, from St. Louis to New Orleans in the antebellum south before the Civil War. Set on April Fool's Day ...a hint to the narrative, apparently on board is a confidence-man hence the title ( maybe more than one, possibly many) . A glimpse into the struggles of Americans on the edge of civilization the untamed West nearby, Manifest Destiny the 19th century doctrine of the nation, has come to fruition. However people on the Fidele the name of vessel are a gullible lot, believing nefarious characters with their sob stories and get -rich -quick schemes...as a person remarks "A Ship of Fools". A cripple begs for alms but some do not believe the infirmity others even doubt the color of his skin, especially a man with a wooden leg no sympathy from him, a poor Mexican War veteran 1846- 1848, he says but is it quite true with a ...<br /> hard heart, like his false appendage. An old miser gives money to a perfect stranger, a dubious conclusion follows in order to invest on the stock market and the slick speaking con man, a silver tongued devil absconds without leaving a receipt. Snake oil salesman promises cures for the hopelessly infirm, the overprice bottles are as effective as a fish on land. The Cosmopolitan man as he is known on board the grand Fedele , ( faithful in French) is very persuasive well dressed, a calm nature, a real gentleman in appearance somehow getting the boat's cynical barber to trust his customers, giving credit and taking down a sign which states the opposite view, the businessman will regret this error soon. The passengers begin to ask questions but the man or men are great speakers and ill people want miracles, it still is true today sense goes out the window, only recovery of their health matters. Melville in the novel, makes fun of Emerson and his disciple Thoreau in an around about way the former whaler knows about life, not impressed by a silly philosophy. The book will infuriate numerous readers because of its hidden meanings and the unclear intrigues. Secrets never revealed who is the villain, yet humans are basically unchanged from era to era the good, the bad and the victims.

An arduous read. I read 4 pages a day. Very tough going but I finished it. Only great admiration for the author pulled me through. Not recommended if you have not read his other works. <a href="https://goodreads.com/search/search?q=Moby-Dick;%20or,%20The%20Whale" title="Moby-Dick; or, The Whale" rel="noopener">Moby-Dick; or, The Whale</a>, of course, but for something lighter try <a href="https://goodreads.com/search/search?q=Typee" title="Typee" rel="noopener">Typee</a> and <a href="https://goodreads.com/search/search?q=Omoo" title="Omoo" rel="noopener">Omoo</a>. Both are South Seas adventure stories. Later, when you're hooked, after the diverting <a href="https://goodreads.com/search/search?q=White%20Jacket" title="White Jacket" rel="noopener">White Jacket</a> and <a href="https://goodreads.com/search/search?q=Redburn" title="Redburn" rel="noopener">Redburn</a> and the stories, you may want to move on to the oddments like this and the virtually unreadable <a href="https://goodreads.com/search/search?q=Pierre:%20or,%20The%20Ambiguities" title="Pierre: or, The Ambiguities" rel="noopener">Pierre: or, The Ambiguities</a>.

Short review: Complicated, dense, angry, and funny too (though in that depressing kind of way). <br /><br />Longer, more rambling comments and some quotes: <br /><br />If one is going to try and come up with some sort of definition of a "masterpiece" surely one of the criteria must be an almost permanent relevance - that something of what is said about our species remains as true now as it was when the author picked up his pen. <br /><br />This wonderful book, and a quick google shows me I am far from the first to think this, speaks directly and clearly of our current Trumpian, islamaphobic age, of our conned and conning selves. <br /><br /><i>" Ah, sir, they may talk of the courage of truth, but my trade teaches me that truth sometimes is sheepish. Lies, lies, sir, brave lies are the lions!" </i><br /><br />Current U.S politics in a nutshell. <br /><br /><i><br />"Oftener it falls, that this winged man, who will carry me into the heaven, whirls me into the clouds, then leaps and frisks about with me from cloud to cloud, still affirming that he is bound heavenward and I, being myself a novice, am slow in perceiving that he does not know the way into the heavens, and is merely bent that I should admire his skill to rise..." </i> <br /><br />Is almost too perfect a description of Trump. <br /><br />And the extraordinary section on indian-hating (for which one can easily replace the word "indian" with "muslim") - (note that, in the following quote, these are not the words of our author, but those of a judge, as reported by another character - there are many layers here, in other words) <br /><br /><i> "..are all Indians like Mocmohoc?--Not all have proved such; but in the least harmful may lie his germ. There is an Indian nature. "Indian blood is in me," is the half-breed's threat.--But are not some Indians kind?--Yes, but kind Indians are mostly lazy, and reputed simple--at all events, are seldom chiefs; chiefs among the red men being taken from the active, and those accounted wise. Hence, with small promotion, kind Indians have but proportionate influence. And kind Indians may be forced to do unkind biddings. So "beware the Indian, kind or unkind," said Daniel Boone, who lost his sons by them.--But, have all you backwoodsmen been some way victimized by Indians?--No.--Well, and in certain cases may not at least some few of you be favored by them?--Yes, but scarce one among us so self-important, or so selfish-minded, as to hold his personal exemption from Indian outrage such a set-off against the contrary experience of so many others, as that he must needs, in a general way, think well of Indians; or, if he do, an arrow in his flank might suggest a pertinent doubt.<br /><br />"'In short,' according to the judge, 'if we at all credit the backwoodsman, his feeling against Indians, to be taken aright, must be considered as being not so much on his own account as on others', or jointly on both accounts. True it is, scarce a family he knows but some member of it, or connection, has been by Indians maimed or scalped. What avails, then, that some one Indian, or some two or three, treat a backwoodsman friendly-like? He fears me, he thinks. Take my rifle from me, give him motive, and what will come? Or if not so, how know I what involuntary preparations may be going on in him for things as unbeknown in present time to him as me--a sort of chemical preparation in the soul for malice, as chemical preparation in the body for malady.'<br /><br />"Not that the backwoodsman ever used those words, you see, but the judge found him expression for his meaning. And this point he would conclude with saying, that, 'what is called a "friendly Indian" is a very rare sort of creature; and well it was so, for no ruthlessness exceeds that of a "friendly Indian" turned enemy. A coward friend, he makes a valiant foe.”<br /></i> <br /><br />And then, for those of you who prefer their novels to come seasoned with a little meta: <br /><i><br />"If reason be judge, no writer has produced such inconsistent characters as nature herself has. It must call for no small sagacity in a reader unerringly to discriminate in a novel between the inconsistencies of conception and those of life as elsewhere. Experience is the only guide here; but as no one man can be coextensive with what is, it may be unwise in every case to rest upon it. When the duck-billed beaver of Australia was first brought stuffed to England, the naturalists, appealing to their classifications, maintained that there was, in reality, no such creature; the bill in the specimen must needs be, in some way, artificially stuck on. <br /><br />But let nature, to the perplexity of the naturalists, produce her duck-billed beavers as she may, lesser authors some may hold, have no business to be perplexing readers with duck-billed characters. Always, they should represent human nature not in obscurity, but transparency, which, indeed, is the practice with most novelists, and is, perhaps, in certain cases, someway felt to be a kind of honor rendered by them to their kind. But, whether it involve honor or otherwise might be mooted, considering that, if these waters of human nature can be so readily seen through, it may be either that they are very pure or very shallow. ....But as, in spite of seeming discouragement, some mathematicians are yet in hopes of hitting upon an exact method of determining the longitude, the more earnest psychologists may, in the face of previous failures, still cherish expectations with regard to some mode of infallibly discovering the heart of man.<br /><br />But enough has been said by way of apology for whatever may have seemed amiss or obscure in the character of the merchant; so nothing remains but to turn to our comedy, or, rather, to pass from the comedy of thought to that of action." </i> <br /><br />This is a difficult book. The sentence structure is complex - Melville seems to be under the impression he will be paid by the comma - and the focus of the critique is much more complex and subtle than it may appear. One has to read very carefully and closely (particularly in the second half) in order not to be led astray (to be conned as it were - there is most definitely a sense in which the con man being laid bare here is the writer, and us his victims.). The section on indian-hating can be, and has been, completely misread. Any reader of Melville must recognise where he stands when it comes to pedlars of race-hatred and, accordingly, should not be misled by words coming from his character's mouths.<br /><br />I am far too lazy at present to bother to write more (and to whom would I possibly be rambling, when so much already exists on this book?). Suffice it to say that any of you curious about whether or not he has another masterpiece up his sleeve other than the Whale Book really should go give this a try...

This is the kind of book that could’ve gone on forever, concluding only when the author’s spleen and/or exuberance gave out, and Melville admitted as much with the last sentence<br /><br /><i>Something further may follow of this Masquerade.</i><br /><br />but this reader’s glad it didn’t, as his enthusiasm for the book faded toward the end. Which isn’t to knock the book necessarily, since <i>The Confidence Man</i> is almost more of a conceptual piece than a novel; meaning that the idea is as important, or even more, than the actual execution; and the idea is a winner. <br /><br />The entire novel takes place aboard a boat going down the Mississippi from St. Louis to New Orleans, and all the action takes place on a single day, April 1. The main character (or characters) is a confidence man who shape-shifts into at least six personages during the journey, from a crippled black man to a gregarious white cosmopolitan. But then this is all inference by the reader, as Melville treats all his manifestations as separate and distinct beings, playing the confidence man himself, never admitting the deception. <br /><br />All of these avatars of the con man attempt to fleece their fellow passengers in one way or another, but as they’re doing it they are also, through Melville, calling attention to hot button issues of the day, from Native American widows and orphans needing assistance to a proliferation of so many different bank notes issued by so many different banks that people couldn’t tell what was real money and what wasn’t to the popularity of Emerson and Transcendentalism (which Melville apparently loathed). So Melville uses the format as a vehicle for social commentary, but I think his larger concerns were with personal identity and faith.<br /><br />Reading <i>The Confidence Man</i> can induce a very curious state of mind, a state in which one doesn’t know how to take anything, as if presented with a substantive riddle with no solution; so reading the book itself becomes an issue of faith, of moving forward through irreducible uncertainty. Much of this is due to the fact that the confidence man is one of, if not the most, sympathetic characters on the boat. As he moves from personage to personage imploring them to have faith, to have trust and confidence in them, the few who refuse to fall for his ploys are the meanest most ingrown characters of the bunch; as if by refusing faith, even in a flimflammer, is to reduce and circumscribe one’s life to such a degree as to become a crabbed asocial nutjob.<br /><br />In this way Melville emphasizes the importance of faith, but from a cynical angle, as if it’s the only option when living in a world where nothing is as it seems, where nothing can be trusted in the traditional sense; in effect saying that when living in a world where nothing can be trusted the only healthy option is to trust everything. This can be construed, in terms of faith as a concept, as a kind of nihilistic Christianity, or even more accurately, Buddhism, as there seems to be know over-arching “god” on Melville’s boat, just a big cloud of uncertainty and deception, of Maya. And reading the book itself gives the feeling of navigating through Maya, of navigating without any certain knowledge other than faith.

<i>Crees que el dinero es el único motivo para los dolores y los peligros, el engaño y el mal en este mundo. ¿Cuánto dinero ganó el diablo por engañar a Eva?</i><br /><br />Herman Melville es y será uno de mis autores favoritos. De hecho, Moby Dick es mi libro preferido.<br />El Embaucador es la historia de un farsante de poca monta y charlatán que se sube a un barco que va de Mississippi a New Orleans y, disfrazándose, va engatusando a pasajero desprevenidos, formado por banqueros, filántropos, políticos y otras personalidades de la época (tengamos en cuenta que El Embaucador es su última novela larga, publicada en 1857), usualmente para sacarles plata, utilizando como recursos de convencimiento la caridad y la confianza.<br />Este embaucador puede camuflarse bajo el aspecto de un sordomudo rubio con un cartel a cuestas, un negro con las piernas deformadas, un hombre vestido de luto con un crespón, un doctor en hierbas con sobre todo color rapé, un representante de la "Oficina de Informaciones Filosóficas", y un filántropo de ideas descabelladas, pero nadie arriba del Fidèle puede serle indiferente.<br />¿Es un charlatán y un embustero? Seguramente, pero también en sus exposiciones y proposiciones descubre el velo de la hipocresía y el egoísmos de esas personas que encuentra en el barco, muestra el costado menos brillante del alma humana.<br />Cargada de mucho humor negro, absurdo y parodia, la novela es también una contundente oportunidad para Melville, ya que le permite imponer una fuerte crítica al "dios" dinero y el capitalismo de la época que sigue vigente hoy día.<br />Para esta época, el autor ya había prácticamente tirado la toalla luego del revés sufrido tras el rotundo fracaso de Moby Dick, que paradójicamente se erigiría en una de las más grandes novelas de la literatura universal, a partir de su reedición de 1924, lo que posiciona a Melville como otro de los tantos escritores geniales incomprendidos en su época y que hoy son gloriosos.<br />En líneas generales me gustó, aunque el libro es un poco ecléctico (de hecho pareciera ser una novela inconclusa). Tal vez, me sentí por momentos un poco despistado como le sucedió al público de 1857.<br />De todos modos, le doy cuatro estrellas, ya que volviendo a lo que declaro en el comienzo de mi reseña, Herman Melville nunca dejará de estar entre mis escritores preferidos junto con Franz Kafka, Fiódor Dostoievski y Edgar Allan Poe.

The Confidence Man is a very cryptic book. Poorly received during its time and was the last book he published in his lifetime. It is part morality play, part theatre, part absurd - it is very hard to label in fact. At the beginning, the revolving characters reminded me of Chaucer's Tales (a possible inspiration for Melville?) amd then I also thought of Richard Linkletter's cult classic first movie, Slacker where each character introduces us to a new one and then vanishes. If I compared A Brief History of Seven Killings to Caraveggio, I would compare The Confidence Man to a Rembrandt painting - a quiet chiascuro lit by candles and snuffed out at the end. It is a very post-modern narrative structure complete with recursive stories and chapters which break the fourth wall where the narrator addresses us directly. I would have given it 3.5 stars, but since it is Melville and it was so influential on Pynchon and DFW, I'll settle with four and encourage you to try this one after you conquer the White Whale.

...what <i>is</i> this novel? <i>is</i> it a novel? is it a collection of vignettes? is there a plot? honestly, who knows?<br /><br />Following up the critical failure of <i>Moby-Dick</i>, Melville decided to pen his final novel, <i>The Confidence-Man</i>. I'm not even sure if I can give a plot summary here. It's set on a steamboat on the Mississippi and we sort of jump from character to character as they each are involved with backstories and plots that don't particularly amount to anything.<br /><br />This book is just so odd. I genuinely have no idea what to think of it. In parts it's funny and in other parts it's completely incomprehensible and inpentrable. Honestly, I can only really compare it to something like <i>Finnegans Wake</i> or other famously obtuse novels.<br /><br />I do have a feeling that the problem is with me, however. I think I have to admit defeat. I've a feeling that this is a novel I'll have to revisit, maybe in 40 years time. So, please, await my review.

<br /><br />Combustible, brilliant, dialectical, like a Marx brothers film in the mid American 19th Century. Literally filled with ramshackle, charming, sleazy, opportunistic, phantasmal, eccentric, grotesque, gaudy, loquacious characters who are all out to <br /><br />* Talk- to anyone, about anything, especially their own opinions, biases, agendas, philosophies and observations<br /><br />* Trick- (see above) that is, to "con" anyone they can get their hands on to abide by or follow or merely acknowledge their particular grievances and demands<br /><br />* Make $- beg, borrow, sell, steal, panhandle, wheedle, commiserate, gyp, or simply buy and sell<br /><br />* Survive- this ship of fools has a definite Melville-ian touch of foreboding, decadence and chaos. Nobody here gets out alive, if you will. Everybody's flying by the seat of their pants and everyone is (or seems to be) desperately trying to talk themselves out of thinking about it for very long, if at all.<br /><br /> "The Confidence Man" serves as a devastating critique of the rootlessness of American life and the chaotic fabric of the society we know a tad better (a tad, I say, a tad!) than our ancestors did more than 150 years ago. The formlessness of many of the usual social blocks- class, hereditary privilege, indigenous roots in the soil, etc is very much part of the drift and sway of the Fidele, as it heads down the Mississippi river (like, O I dunno, some other guys did once or twice) and into....whatever...<br /><br />The whole experience of reading this text (Novel? Digression? Dialogues? Sketches?...never mind writing the damn thing in the first place. What was that like for poor tormented, incessantly metaphysical Melville?) has everything which has now known to be categorized as 'Post-modernism': discordant narrative, free interplay of signs and identities and constantly re-imagined borders of the self, language, the world at large. the humor, the self- awareness of the narrative creating itself out of itself, the self-mocking overtures of any definitive statement or final Logos....<br /><br />In a way, it sort of reminded me of Richard Linklater's film "slacker", in that it has a similar rambling, spontaneous, chain of conversational quality. The camera is always moving from table to table as everyone carries on their conversations at any spot at which they happen to be: Smurfs, political insights, Madonna's pap smear, suicide notes, conspiracies and conversations.....<br /><br />It's absolutely indispensable reading for anyone who is, like me, obsessed with the "psyche" or "soul", "spirit" or "inner nature" of America.

<i>Introduction, by Stephen Matterson<br />A Note on the Text<br />Bibliography</i><br /><br />--The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade<br /><br /><i>Notes<br /><br />Appendix A: 'The River'<br />Appendix B: James Hall's 'Sketches'</i>

Dünyanın her yerinde karşılaşılabilecek üçkağıtçıları anlatıyor roman, iki bölüm şeklinde. İlk bölüm hikaye tarzında beş-altı üçkağıtçı öyküsü içeriyor. İkin ci bölüm daha durağan ve felsefi anlatımlı. Kitapta bahsedildiği gibi "üçkağıtçıların kişilerarası bir kefillik sistemi vardır" sözünü kanıtlayan bir roman.