If anyone reads this review, frankly, I’ll be stunned. And impressed. Modern readers would never finish this overlong overwrought story. I meant the book ‘Melmoth the Wanderer’, not my review. Shut up.

First, gentle reader, go to Youtube and play in the background:

https://youtu.be/mpgAm-QeR-4

Or for harsher tastes:

https://youtu.be/BQPAza1KfJg

‘Melmoth the Wanderer’ (metaphorically a malignant moth of the night?) walks the world (well, mostly in Ireland, Spain and an island somewhere off the coast of India) looking for someone to tempt into swearing allegiance to he-who-isn’t-ever-named. Melmoth the Wanderer gave his soul to he-who-isn’t-ever-named in exchange for 150 years of life. The Wanderer doesn’t really DO anything except mostly scare the bejesus out of people who are facing terrible life choices that lead to (or not) supposedly horrible un-Christian and immoral values.

A new sad short story is introduced every time a character meets another character. Each person tells a long-winded short story involving the meeting of a character who begins another sad but instructive story.

Some of these nested short stories involve Catholics who suffer agonies of the damned! Spanish Catholic inquisitors and doctrinaire monks are insane and wicked! They use actual torture and totalitarian mind-control over other unfortunate Catholic believers.

Wandering Melmoth has a disturbingly piercing look in his eyes and a wicked laugh. He is intelligent with a gift for smooth talking, theoretically. He shows up whenever people are vulnerable, which, frankly, means he only has a walk-in appearance every 1,000 of so pages in this novel of a million pages. Wait, sorry! The actual page count is almost 700. It only seems like a million pages.

Charles Maturin liked to write a lot primarily on overwrought fearful emotions and intense soul-searching desperation. He used only about 50 of the 600+ pages for actual action. For the character of Melmoth, Maturin’s pleasure was in writing extensively about his fears and emotional agonies. Omg, did he enjoy himself writing about emotional agonies! In run-on paragraphs…

One story involves a formerly innocent (virgin) woman who falls into error by loving the Wandering Melmoth. She believed Melmoth really loved her, thus dooming herself and her family to extended emotional misery and social shame. Surprise! - an early death is in the cards for her after her un-sanctified baby girl is born. The baby is also doomed since it is a living sin, not a person of God.

Peculiarly, none of the main male characters pass on sin to innocent babies, only women do. Nor do any of the men fail their moral tests or opportunities for redemption with the exception of the damned and wholly incompetent Wandering Melmoth. He basically grins spookily and talks shit everywhere he wanders - the main signs he is evil and is trying to do evil. (2023 Edit: Reminds me of Christian and conservative males today.) The Wanderer never once commits an act of violence or hurts anyone. He is really just a sweet-talking guy without a soul. Only the Catholic monks do violence and torture.

The Catholic monk’s story is brutal! The starving family (will the father eat his kids? will the young daughter prostitute herself? will mom die of starvation?) and the two different women’s stories (marry dishonorably as judged by God or not, and suffer social or emotional damnation forever?), not so much. But there be ghosts, and pictures on walls with eyes that watch you, and a spooky Melmoth haunting everybody including the first narrator, called Melmoth as well, who starts the nesting tales when his horrible uncle dies, bequeathing a haunting picture hidden away inside a closet - watching, watching, watching, eyes glittering....

The woman who loved Melmoth dies for her sin, which was apportioned to her in her having a baby, the proof of unsanctified-by-religious-authorities sexual desire. Very judgy and unfair, gentle reader. The men characters must do sex as well, I suspect, hello, a baby happens (human women don’t do parthenogenisis, married or unmarried) but somehow sex is not as much of a killing sin for men as it is for women in this book. I am wondering at this moment how the author’s religious ideas of women having loving sex with a man they love and the man also says he loves her, somehow always kills off unmarried women through giving birth. Meanwhile the unmarried fathers get the opportunity for redemption, exciting travel and staying alive to praise God later. Is this supposed to attract women to religious values!

Edit, March 2023: Wait! Actually, I guess given the evidence of legal changes for many Americans in the states in the South and the Midwest today, I guess a lot of women will soon be punished once again for having sex, whether the sex is forced on the woman or not! Being forced to have an unwanted or unhealthy baby they can’t afford to have, without having decent healthcare insurance or child care, while the fathers can walk away, and often do walk away despite love promises or the laws about child support. After all, boys will be boys! They are often considered blameless, being without any visible sin, you know, the baby bump. Men can go on, move on, and often do live without the social or economic devastation the woman has. I guess this return of the legal inequality of gender economics, not to mention Old Testament religious judgement on female sex in cases of rape, child marriage, incest, seems to be accepted by Southern and Midwestern women (women being in sin for sexual desires, men just being boys). I mean, if I lived in the South or Midwest and was a young woman, I would be yelling and demonstrating about losing my rights, protesting at having to have a baby I don’t want until I’m ready for a baby, voting for liberals, joining women’s rights organizations, moving to a state where women were actually respected as being a person or given a chance for an education. To be more than only impoverished babymakers sweating under the hard hands of men holding all of the cards to economic freedom and religious judgement. I’d be figuring out where my clitoris was, and how I can control sexual experiences. If I was a man, who, one never knows, sometimes the law works for women, might be actually caught up and prosecuted in an enforcement net of the laws about child support, garnishment of wages and so on, I as the father might be having to pay to support his unwanted or chronically ill child with an expensive disability, I would be making an appointment for a vasectomy. Today.


Original review continues:

By a strange coincidence, the author, Charles Robert Maturin (1782-1824), was an Irish Protestant clergyman who hated the Catholic Church as much as he feared atheists and the devil. He was completely biased and judgy, no shame.

He wouldn’t have liked me, gentle reader. I’m an atheist because all religions despise and punish women when they act or want to act like normal people, or have the same rights as men. Maturin does not deviate from the usual dogma of every religion in regards to women even though he clearly believes the Catholic Church is horribly wrong in their (early millennia) use of torture to punish and kill, and in the maintenance of celibate religious organizations.

Some religious folks today categorize me as damned - which is the usual religious pile-on of horseshit dumped on women. I think women are equal to men because of my college education with actual real-life history taught without censorship or any banning of books. The truly just and fair moral values of Western secularism are permitted to be taught to students in most colleges. Religious values suck for women, gentle reader. I’m a free bitch, baby.

Sigh.

‘Melmoth the Wanderer’, a ‘gothic romance’, was published in 1820. Believe it or not, many writers in the nineteenth century admired ‘Melmoth the Wanderer’. Honoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, Sir Walter Scott, and Lord Byron liked it. Oscar Wilde was Maturin’s great-nephew and he liked it. An opera and a play was done based on some of the author’s other works of angsty gothic atmosphere and the over-the-top lengthy agonizing of being morally compromised internally and eternally.

I liked [b:Robinson Crusoe|2932|Robinson Crusoe|Daniel Defoe|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1682976488l/2932._SY75_.jpg|604666], published in 1719 much better despite its also primitive, still developing, style as an early novel. However, like ‘Robinson Crusoe’, ‘Melmoth the Wanderer’ is recommended reading. I recommend skimming. However, for Literature buffs the proto-novel is interesting as the novel evidently influenced the direction of other gothic genre books following its publication.

Well, more 3 1/2 stars. There's a very good gothic novel in here battling to get out and at times the atmosphere drips so deeply it fair soaks your shoes. However, by Frankenstein's furry ferrets it doesn't half go on and twiddle about with tales within tales and oh CM's a bit not keen on Catholicism. There's a point made in the accompanying critical essay that things would've been improved if the novel had been a collective of separate but linked tales and I'm minded to agree.

In summary, the atmosphere and plot ideas are all in there, but balanced with flaws, so there we are really.

Άξια τέσσερα αστέρια για τη γραφή, 3,5 αστερια υποκειμενικά ξεκάθαρα γιατί κουράστηκα με τις περιγραφές..πολυ δυνατή η αρχη κ το τέλος του οπως κ κάποιες εγκιβωτισμενες αφηγήσεις.
Αξίζει να διαβαστεί. Απαιτείται πειθαρχία στην ανάγνωση..

2.75-ish rounded to 3 (in terms of enjoyment) - this is a very cool book that is really well written, but the act of reading it was a LOT

Feeling very generous with 3/5.
Maturin spends as much time pontificating as he does telling a story. If you value concision and brevity highly, you'd do well to stay away.
It starts OK enough with a young Melmoth and his dying miser of an uncle and a mysterious painting of an ancestor, Melmoth the Wanderer, rumoured to still be alive even though he was born 150 years earlier.
We soon delve into stories within stories - Melmoth appears in all of them. Maturin makes use of an annoying plot device several times: missing or illegible pages from journals, narrators conveniently not recalling the climax of a story. So we skip ahead and more mystery remains.
One of the longest story is that of Alonzo, a young Spaniard forced into the orders. This is painstakingly boring, there's a not-so-bad tale at the heart of it, but Maturin spends so much time going on and on and on and on and on about how bad and hypocritical the Catholic church is that it becomes unbearable. I put the book down for about a week before resuming, and I was only halfway through that story.
Thankfully, it did get better after that. The other long central story is that of Immalee, a lone daughter of nature living on an island off the coast of India. One day Melmoth visits her, and changes her destiny forever. From this point on, Melmoth becomes a central character, rather than a supernatural force appearing only now and then to scorn, frighten and tempt men. The first part of the tale has a nice eerie feel, and I finally had some sense of involvement with the characters as the story went on. The narrative was broken by two more nested stories which weren't bad. Melmoth, feared as the Devil by so many men, turns out to be a rather pitiable character, with a shred of humanity remaining in him. I have to admit skim-reading quite a bit, especially some of the conversations between Melmoth and Immalee. But the gradual character reveal (rather than actual character growth) worked very well.
Eventually, the tales wound up nicely and mysteries get resolved. None too soon for sure!

I give! UNCLE!!

This book got the best of me. I can't think of the last time I threw a book down in frustration after 250 pages. How do I get that far and give up? Well, Christmas may have something to do with it. Whenever I'm visiting someone's home and reading a book, people feel compelled to walk up to me and start talking. If I go try to hide, they come and find me to "check" on me and then the talking starts. All this damn Christmas cheer (bah humbug) makes it hard to read a book that requires a lot of focus.

I feel sorry for anyone who is forced to read this book because it should only be read for pleasure. The sentences are impossible to parse and the plot itself is tough to decipher. Maturin had a lot of demons he was trying to exorcise with the writing of this book, and the plot and characters feel like a thin layer over this anti-Catholic lectures. I didn't even like the footnotes, which were equally nebulous.

This is really a collection of stories, held together by the character of Melmoth the Wanderer. They are nested one inside the other down to about five levels, with makes it a bit difficult at time to remember where we are in the different plots.

The stories are engaging. They show us their protagonists in the most desperate of circumstances and still unwilling to take Melmoth's place. However, there's definitely too much of a good thing: The author's style is extremely wordy, I would often have preferred much shorter descriptions that keep the stories moving.