Hardcover, 266 pages
Spanish language
Published June 13, 1981 by Bruguera.
La aventura —la fascinación que despierta el hecho de enfrentarse a sucesos extraordinarios— bastaría sin duda para justificar una obra tan imaginativa como la de E. A. Poe, pero no para entender su carácter profundamente humano, que le convierte en una acabada metáfora del destino del hombre, situado ante desconocidas fuerzas que escapan a su control.
Arthur Gordon Pym, joven deseoso de escapar a la rutina a causa de la atracción que en él despiertan los relatos de su amigo August, se esconde a bordo del Grampus para convertirse en privilegiado testigo de extraños encuentros y apariciones, acontecimientos que resultan siempre verosímiles gracias a la naturalidad con que se mueven los personajes de este gran autor de la literatura fantástica.
Unfortunately antiquated (read: racist) portrayal of other, albeit, imaginary peoples
More deeply enjoyed with the footnotes of this edition, belying the autobiographical elements of the story
More like The Narrative of Arthur Boredom Pym. I did learn a lot about curing sea cucumbers, so I guess I have that going for me now.
[The version I read is in fact part of The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allen Poe (Random House 1938), a book I've been reading from since childhood.]
Let's just say if this was my first taste of Poe there never would have been a second. I chose it because of references in notes to the HPL book I just read, and they're part of the same cultural eddy, sure. A noxious backwater it is, though, to continue the metaphor.
That the seagoing part goes on and on I can forgive. Some stories wax long on description. The racist stuff though is outdated and disappointing... All that "savages" stuff, ugh. It started out in such a promising manner: dated but entertaining.
If you like Poe generally, and don't need to read this for research or studies, I'd definitely give it a pass. It did not age well!
I came across a mention of this in an article and thought "Poe wrote a novel?" This is his only novel and from his own admission he wrote it to cash in on a craze for sea stories.
It is really terrible, but so terrible that it often crosses over into amusing, which is why I gave it two stars instead of three. But I can't really recommend it. I facepalmed and said "what...." a lot while I was reading it, and there is a lot of very deeply awful racism in the last half. Stick to the creepy short stories.
Is this the wellspring of American horror fiction? Poe's novel lays down the tropes -- the individual in extremis, a spirit of scientific speculation in tension with racial panic -- that Lovecraft would develop later (the business with the sea cucumbers must have given HPL a horripilating charge). Curious to know what Melville thought of this. A deeply racist book, perhaps best read in cold blood, in spite of which arises a warm admiration for Poe's inventiveness.
Doesn't make you want to go to sea.
It may be painless to mount a defense of this work despite its many flaws, in that it is an relic of a very specific time and place. However I am not about to do so.
This book is tedious, pointless and dull as dishwater a good 80% of its length. Useless details about ship stowage, map coordinates, the market for sea cucumbers and so on may set a certain feeling of reality for a population used to sea faring memoirs, but exciting reading they do not make.
There is some Poe sensibility here, especially near the end, but not enough to answer for the utterly pointless digressions that plague the majority of Pope's only novel.
He should have stuck to sort stories
I added a star for cannibalism but this is a two star book.
This story is mostly entertaining and the time period and writing style make it a fascinating read. There are some parts that (I hate to say) get a bit tedious. Also, I did not get the sense of an ending. It seems to me that Pym died in the end, and that this narrative was found tucked away somewhere on his person. That might not sound very likely, but I can't think of anything much more plausible. Hmm.
I'm intrigued that there was a dog named Tiger, and a character (man) named Richard Parker, also.
