Description de l’éditeur
Winner of the 2018 Best Translated Book Award
Winner of the 2025 Republic of Consciousness Prize, USA & Canada
A dying father in the grip of fever and delirium recounts his youth, his Grand Tour, the Venetian palaces populated by fascinating and evil figures, his ruin, and his most beautiful journey—the crossing on foot of the frozen Hudson River. His son, still a child, sits at the foot of the bed, attentively collecting these final, hallucinated words.
Could the work of Herman Melville—masterful author, misunderstood, far too ahead of his time, and considered crazy and dangerous by some critics—have as its source this ultimate paternal legacy?
Questioning the intricacies of fiction, which constantly oscillatates between reality and imagination, Rodrigo Fresán’s approaches the enigma of the literary vocation in a new light. An invented biography, a gothic novel populated by ghosts, and an evocation of a filial love, Melvill contains all the talent, humor, and immense culture found in the other great works from one of Spanish literature's most ambitious writers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Argentine writer Fresan (The Invented Part) focuses his visionary latest on the inner life of author Herman Melville and the exploits of his tormented father, Allan. In the first section, set in December 1831, 12-year-old Herman sits by Allan's deathbed as the elder Melvill (the second "e" was added later) recounts his illustrious revolutionary roots in Boston, promising marriage to the fetching Maria Gansevoort, ruinous career as a merchant, and mystical final adventure, in which he walks across the frozen Hudson River and hears "messages seeming to come from the Beyond." Herman faithfully records it all—but cannot resist scribbling copious footnotes that embellish, interrupt, and underscore Allan's narrative. In the book's second part, Allan speaks for himself, describing his time in Venice, where he encountered Nicolás Cueva, a "pale young man with white hair" who claims to be undead and imparts forbidden knowledge, prefiguring the subject matter of Herman's novels. The magisterial final act returns to Herman, who narrates his adventures among sailors and cannibals, lambastes his critics, and reunites with his father's ghost. The narrative gestures at the kind of ever-expanding realm of imagination that the great author himself incarnated, and the kind Fresan's Herman prophesies: "A book (a pure style of book, a book of pure style) where many things would end so many others could begin." This is a masterpiece.
