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A review by emilymknight
Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Robert Maturin
Did not finish book. Stopped at 45%.
DNF @ 45%
I really really tried with this book. The writing is beautiful at times but it got to the point where it was a man telling another man about a time when he was talking to another guy who was talking to him about a girl… It was confusing and I just didn’t get what was happening. I thought the spaniard speaking for 200+ pages was a lot but from other reviews I have read, he keeps on going, and when it becomes a narrative in a narrative in a narrative, it’s just not enjoyable.
The same scenes were repeated loads and he described every emotion and feeling of the scene in a million different ways, Maturin said so much but hardly anything happened. The lack of proper formatting during dialogue was annoying too, I’d miss when it changed to another person speaking so then I’d get confused who said what.
It’s a shame because this is a great example of the gothic genre (when the plot is understandable) and with Charles Robert Maturin being Oscar Wilde’s great uncle (by marriage) and someone Wilde looked up to when writing The Picture of Dorian Gray, I really wanted to like it!
Here are some of the quotes from what I read that I did love…
I really really tried with this book. The writing is beautiful at times but it got to the point where it was a man telling another man about a time when he was talking to another guy who was talking to him about a girl… It was confusing and I just didn’t get what was happening. I thought the spaniard speaking for 200+ pages was a lot but from other reviews I have read, he keeps on going, and when it becomes a narrative in a narrative in a narrative, it’s just not enjoyable.
The same scenes were repeated loads and he described every emotion and feeling of the scene in a million different ways, Maturin said so much but hardly anything happened. The lack of proper formatting during dialogue was annoying too, I’d miss when it changed to another person speaking so then I’d get confused who said what.
It’s a shame because this is a great example of the gothic genre (when the plot is understandable) and with Charles Robert Maturin being Oscar Wilde’s great uncle (by marriage) and someone Wilde looked up to when writing The Picture of Dorian Gray, I really wanted to like it!
Here are some of the quotes from what I read that I did love…
“I must have experienced many emotions, but they all subsided like the waves of the sea under the darkness of a midnight sky, - their fluctuation continues, but there is no light to mark their motion, or trace when they rise and fall. A deep stupor pervaded my senses and soul; and perhaps, in this state, I was best fitted for the monotonous existence to which I was doomed. [..] My life was a sea without tide.”
“I was an outcast of the whole earth, and I wept with equal bitterness and depression at the hopeless vastness of the desert I had to traverse.”