I don’t read anything, just to tick off boxes on someone else’s Challenge list. I have however, recently read two candidates for ‘A Book Published Before You Were Born.’ I reread the micro-short story, The Cask of Amontillado, by Edgar Allen Poe. When I downloaded it from the Internet, a note appeared below, saying, People who researched this, were also interested in…. and showing several other old titles, including Herman Melville’s, Bartleby the Scrivener. I’ve never read it, and free is my favorite flavor.
Published 1853
Back in the ’60s, Ajax Cleanser had a series of TV ads where they claimed that their product was Stronger than dirt. Since I am Older Than Dirt, it’s a struggle to find interesting books that old.
The book: Bartleby the Scrivener
The author: Herman Melville
The review:
The entire book is an un-named narrator, relating the tale of the strange actions and attitudes of a clerk that he employed. The titled Bartleby was hired by a lawyer as a scrivener, a man who produced handwritten copies of deeds, and wills, and other legal documents, in the age before typewriters, Xerox machines, or computers.
Bartleby drove his employer to distraction. He produced mountains of perfect copies, but quietly refused to perform any other menial task, such as proof-reading other clerks’ work, or going to the Post Office, with statements like, ”At present I might opt for not to be a bit reasonable.”
Despite it being locked up at close of work hours, the lawyer discovered that Bartleby somehow was living in the offices. Eventually, he refused to do any work, yet continued to firmly but politely, decline to leave the premises.
While the book is 170 years old, I can’t believe that people of the time spoke, or wrote, like this. It must have just been the author’s idiosyncratic technique. The entire book reads like one of those machine-translated spam comments you receive. Scores of words with two or more definitions were used with the wrong meaning in the context of the passage.
After a few phrases touching on his qualifications, I engaged him, satisfied to have among my corps of copyists a person of so singularly sedate an issue, which I notion might perform beneficially upon the flighty temper of Turkey, and the fiery certainly one of Nippers.
Turkey and Nippers were the nicknames of two of the narrator’s other law clerks. A third was Ginger Nut, because his desk drawer was often full of shells of various nuts, which he irritated the office by cracking and eating while at work.
The fiery Nippers, among other strange actions, had been known to grasp up a ruler, point it at the cease of the room, (taken to mean ‘the far end’) and shout, “Fee the foe!”, an expression that neither Bing, nor Google, nor Dictionary.com are aware of. After some thought, I came to assume that the first word should be fie?? An expression of mild disgust or annoyance.
His fourth copyist, is rendered as ¼. The third key to his private apartment, is described as .33. It’s a one-trick-pony, or a one-joke-book. It never sold widely. It was mildly amusing for what it was, but not terribly deep, or socially significant, and always slightly confusing. Ah well, it was an adventure. Despite being as old as it is, it ticked off a box in another blogger’s Challenge. When was the last time you tried something new? 😕
Archon's Den 