From Rodrigo Fresán’s White Whale Hunt to the Hell of the Salem Witch Trials

★★★★★

For Diego Gandara

Each new book by Rodrigo Fresán is a pleasant surprise, a door that opens and through which one enters a universe that is neither magical nor wonderful, but deep and possible above all things thanks to the hypnotic power that reading it provokes, a style highly realistic. Eighth novel after the Proustian trilogy made up of “The invented part”, “The dreamed part” and “The remembered part”, in “Melvill” Fresán presents the story of a father and a son who, when he grows up, will be a writer . And not just anyone, but one of the pillars of American literature: Herman Melville.

The father is not just any father. It is someone who, on the night of December 10, 1831, crosses the frozen Hudson River on foot and arrives home blown away by fever and delirium and where he dies a few months later, tied hand and foot to his bed, enveloped in the thick mist of madness. which his son, who was then twelve years old and had already been removed from school, witnessed. Thus, from the figures of the creator of “Moby Dick” and that of his father, Allan Melvill, an Albany merchant in permanent and definitive bankruptcy, Fresán opens the doors and ports to a hallucinated and amazing story that embarks out to sea in the wake of that giant white whale that is the frozen memory of childhood and, also, the always perennial and lasting relationship between a father and a son who remembers those years and does it like a writer: imagining, dreaming, writing.

you deep

“Melvill”, like that “Call me Ishmael” with which the legendary “Moby Dick” opens, is a call, an invitation to adventure and a response, perhaps, to the literary vocation and the paternal vocation, which, like the voices of the father and the son, deep voices that seem to come from the sea of ​​a time gone but present, come together and intersperse and merge beyond the storms, the bad times. “Melvill”, in any case, is all that and much more. It is a dialogue with the past, with literature, with the work itself and a descent into the frozen winters of childhood, that place that grows as the ice decreases and where all vocations are forged and where all calls are answered, Although many times you would prefer not to.

▲ The best

The personal style of the author, who composes a world of strange poetry and musicality

▼ worst

We can’t say anything, because it’s a round novel, from someone at the peak of maturity

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