Call Me Ishmaelle
There ought to be an award for artistic audacity — Goethe believed audacity was integral to talent — and it ought to go to Xiaolu Guo for her new novel, Call Me Ishmaelle. It’s an astonishingly ambitious undertaking that even when it stumbles does so with vivified striving ... She has devised her narrative as Melville devises his, in short, potent chapters, though only a handful of her characters correspond directly to Melville’s ... Accept the invitation to experience Guo’s novel solely through the prism of political piety and you will occlude what is best in it: the masterly scene construction, the galling details of whaler life and whale slaughter, the portrayal of Ishmaelle’s dolorous yearning and inviolate hope, the sinew of its storytelling sensibility, the stabbing finale. You may not get Melville’s aesthetic majesty and visionary power, nor what Camille Paglia referred to as his novel’s 'operatic gigantism,' but you will get a bold new version that sends you back to its numinous source.
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A triumph ... There is so much pleasure to be had in rereading old favorites — and part of the joy is meeting beloved characters, who have been updated or somehow arrive in a new form to resist old tropes and types. Guo’s recasting of Ishmaelle is no exception.
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Call me disappointed. It is not impossible to adapt or reimagine Moby-Dick ... Even writers not nearly as skilled as Melville could craft valuable works of their own out of this drama, and plenty have. The British-Chinese writer Xiaolu Guo’s new novel, Call Me Ishmaelle, is not one of them ... Imitation here is less flattery than it is embarrassment, though Melville is innocent of all that Guo inflicts on him. Where his paragraphs are Minoan mazes, Guo’s prose is oddly guileless and frequently awkward ... Guo’s few narrative departures from her source material mostly relate to Ishmaelle’s gender masquerade, though even these divergences rarely seem to make much difference ... This is Moby-Dick drained of the sublime concert of language and thought that makes it worth reading, as if Guo had simply pulled the cork on the great bathtub of the ocean. Were it not for a particularly horrific sequence of sexual violence, Call Me Ishmaelle might pass as an attempt to make Melville accessible for young readers. It is not clear who or what else it might be for.
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