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Rating:  -
You'll notice that the reviewers of this book have read biographies and/or scholarly criticism of the book. They infer Melville's intent in "The Confidence Man," based on what scholars have learned about him through his dealings with other literary figures and from his other writings.
I read this book without any of the benefits of a literary criticism or in the context of a course. Basically, I found this book on my shelf, and I picked it up. I majored in English in college a long time ago, and I vaguely remembered liking the Melville that I had read in the past. I can report that taking on this book without scholarly grounding is difficult. I enjoyed it anyway, and I understood a lot of the arguments that characters in the book were making and the absurdity of the situations that they postured to each other. But the greater import of those discussions and digressions was less obvious to me than to other reviewers -- or perhaps I'm more modest in what I claim to have divined from the book.
The book is choppy at first. In early chapters, different characters emerge and interact on a riverboat that's heading down the Mississippi at a time when the West was still largely unexplored. In each vignette, a "confidence man" tries to get money from an "innocent" or group of innocents. (It's not clear if some of them are the same person. A few reviewers state definitely that all the early confidence men are the devil in disguise -- but it's not important anyway whether they are the same person or different people.) In the early going, the confidence men are almost universally successful at borrowing money, selling useless medicine or stock certificates, etc. In the second half of the book, wiser and more cynical people challenge the confidence men, and the confidence men take their lack of success in stride. This slim plot outline brings forth a series of logical and illogical arguments about the need to trust people and the reasons for a lack of trust in the world -- and that's the point of the book.
If you enjoy reading philosophical arguments, then you will enjoy the book. These are short arguments, sometimes leavened with humor. Some hold up well today, and some are silly to our modern sensibilities. But the book is a nice digression from modern novel fare, despite its difficult passages.
Rating:  -
Here is a novel mostly composed of dialogues - hence the Socraticness of my review title - and the main subject is "confidence", or "faith". It all takes place on April 1st, on a boat. The "confidence man" is a sneaky character, as you will not spot him before a few chapters, and critics and readers alike can only guess which character he was hiding as in the beginning. I entirely missed out on him myself, as I am not used to suppose that various characters might just be the same, disguised.
This is not a typical novel, and if you're looking for a sea adventure as with "Omoo" or "Typee" or other of Melville's novels, you will not find it. It is aboard a boat indeed, but that's as far as the similarities go. The "confidence man" mostly argues with other characters on said boat, and their conversations are mighty interesting. This is no adventure novel, but more like a conversational novel, and a good one at that.
Nevertheless, it is a bit bewildering perhaps, because of its obscurity, if any, and you will probably feel like you missed out on much, as I did (feel).
A good read for sure, and good dialogues, and a very important topic: trust, confidence, faith.
Rating: -
"The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade" is, as its title would suggest, a satirical farce. In spite of its wit and the occasional laugh, however, it is the hardest of all Melville's works to follow, in no small part because its lead character keeps changing his identity--and that is assuming, by the way, that there's just one lead character to begin with. If at times the novel feels like a patchwork, it's because it is: Melville merged a number of stories and travel pieces originally intended for magazine publication into a continuous, claustrophobic cyclorama.
Set on the Mississippi River on April Fool's Day, "The Confidence-Man" follows the interrelated episodes and adventures of a stream of passengers who board and disembark a steamboat. Many of the confidence men (and their prophetic counterparts) may be the same person in various disguises. (Melville's deliberate obfuscation on this point has launched a hundred academic papers.)
The various scoundrels, shills, suckers, and shape-shifters are a parade of American types: "men of business and men of pleasure; parlor men and backwoodsmen; farm-hunters and fame-hunters; heiress-hunters, gold-hunters, buffalo-hunters, bee-hunters, happiness-hunters, truth-hunters, and still keener hunters after all these hunters." Everyone on board is trying to sell something or to swindle someone or to raise money for a charity or to find a job or to convince a fellow passenger of his own integrity. A persistent theme is the typically American monomaniacal pursuit of money.
"I am neither prophet nor charlatan," says a peddler of medicine to a sick man. "But again I say, you must have confidence." Yet only a fool would have confidence, and this insecurity leads to an irrational paranoia. Nobody can trust anyone: "it is one of the imbecilities of the suspicious person to fancy that every stranger, however absent-minded, he sees so much as smiling or gesturing to himself in any odd sort of way, is secretly making him his butt."
For obvious reasons, "The Confidence-Man" is considered the precursor of the modernist novel. As an academic exercise, it's both intriguing and (to use a technical term) "mind-blowing." And there is certainly a steady stream of quotable aphorisms and clever anecdotes. Yet I also found the novel to be frustrating: somewhat like entering a labyrinth from which there is no hope of escape or solution--and at the end of the book you're still stuck in the maze. The farce is a lot of fun initially but it becomes a bit maddening and repetitive after reaching one too many of the novel's narrative dead ends.
As one of Melville's contemporary reviewers noted, the novel makes as much sense if the chapters are read in reverse order, and the "characters" are distinguishable not by their personalities as much as they are defined by their wholly predictable actions and reactions. Halfway down the Old Muddy, after meeting the Melville's umpteenth American stereotype, I realized that the novel had no Bartleby or Nippers, nor, for that matter, would readers be introduced to a K. or an Olga. Instead, "The Confidence-Man" is like Kafka without characters.
Rating:  -
As I read this book, I didn't catch all the subtleties of it, and could never be precisely sure whether each confidence man was evil or not- it seemed ambiguous, or at least, the author never once allows the reader to find out definitively that the 'vicitms' are being gulled. However, by the end of the book, this becomes more clear as the second half settles into sxome extremely thought-provoking conversations and exchanges. After reading literary reviews online, the book in its totality makes even more sense as in retrospect its sublte points become clearer.
That being said, the writing is absolutely superb. Although far more wordy than Hemingway, one cannot avoid comparing to Hemingway's writing, which, like this, is extremely controlled, restrained and pointed. As you read this, you cannot avoid the feeling that the author spent hours on each sentence.
It is therefore very much so worth reading, but don't expect it to be easy. It's certainly not your verbose, nineteenth century romanctic glop, but it can be difficult, as some readers appear to have found it. But try it.
Rating:  -
This is like a precurser to the Beat movement of the 1950's. The sentences are overly long, it's written like a police report so you become overly aware that there is a narrator which takes much away from the telling of the story. The characters are not interesting and the story is boring.
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