Pierre, Herman Melville
Pierre, Herman Melville
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Pierre
or, The Ambiguities

Author: Herman Melville

Narrator: Robin Field

Unabridged: 19 hr 46 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/31/2016

Categories: Fiction, Classic


Synopsis

Pierre Glendinning is the nineteen-year-old heir to the manor at Saddle Meadows in upstate New York. Engaged to the blonde Lucy Tartan in a match approved by his domineering mother, Pierre encounters the dark and mysterious Isabel Banford, who claims to be his half-sister, the illegitimate and orphaned child of his father and a European refugee. Driven by his magnetic attraction to Isabel, Pierre devises a remarkable scheme to preserve his father’s name, spare his mother’s grief, and give Isabel her proper share of the estate.First published in 1852, Pierre was condemned by critics of the time: “a dead failure,” “this crazy rigmarole,” and “a literary mare’s nest.” Latter-day critics, however, have recognized in the story of Melville’s idealistic young hero a corrosive satire of the sentimental gothic novel and a revolutionary foray into modernist literary techniques.

About Herman Melville

Herman Melville (1819–1891) was born in New York City. Family hardships forced him to leave school for various occupations, including shipping as a cabin boy to Liverpool in 1839—a voyage that sparked his love for the sea. A shrewd social critic and philosopher in his fiction, he is considered an outstanding writer of the sea and a great stylist who mastered both realistic narrative and a rich, rhythmical prose. He is best known for his novel Moby-Dick and the posthumously published novella Billy Budd.

About Robin Field

Robin Field is the AudioFile Earphones Award–winning narrator of numerous audiobooks, as well as an award-winning actor, singer, writer, and lyricist whose career has spanned six decades. He has starred on and off Broadway, headlined at Carnegie Hall, authored numerous musical reviews, and hosted or performed on a number of television and radio programs over the years.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Kirk on January 18, 2009

I like to think of this as the Metal Machine Music of American literature. It's a crazy, baffling, totally alienating renunciation of readers of the 19th-century popular marketplace that mixes filial bile, Gothic satire, philosophical essay, and tantalizing hints of impropriety (threesome!) with som......more

Goodreads review by robin on April 03, 2024

Reading Pierre For Melville's Bicentennial This year marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 -- 1891). To commemorate the birth of one of my favorite writers, I read Melville's seventh novel "Pierre or the Ambiguities" published in 1852 just after "Moby-Dick". "Pie......more

Goodreads review by Ashley on January 16, 2008

there's no getting around it, melville's mastery of language is up there with shakespeare, faulkner, and woolf. it's the kind of language that draws so much attention to itself that, at times, you stop reading for the plot and start reading for the texture of the sentences themselves. pierre is not......more

Goodreads review by Chris on October 25, 2018

A few weeks after finishing this, possibly Melville's best work even though it's almost never read, I remain overwhelmed by it and don't at the moment have the language, ability, or courage to approach it with a thorough review, so I'll just offer some general thoughts and advice. One of the hazards......more


Quotes

“In one sense a kind of aftershock to Moby-Dick, Pierre also displays Melville’s magnificent artistic restlessness, the ruthless self-revisionism that leads him repeatedly to explode and reinvent the premises he works from. Melville had been the novelist of tropical islands, open oceans, and sailing voyages. But in Pierre he abruptly reinvents himself as a domestic novelist, proposing to write a psychodrama of family intimacy—and more particularly, to chart the emotional dependencies produced in the hyperaffectionate, inward-turning, hothouse family newly prominent in Melville’s time.” New York Times

“Herman Melville is one of American literature’s greatest figures.” Cambridge Guide to Literature in English