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by Rodrigo Fresan
A dying father in the grip of fever and delirium recounts his youth, his Grand Tour, the Venetian palaces populated by fascinating and evil figures, his ruin, and his most beautiful journey—the crossing on foot of the frozen Hudson River.
His son, still a child, sits at the foot of the bed, attentively collecting these final, hallucinated words.
Could the work of Herman Melville—masterful author, misunderstood, far too ahead of his time, and considered crazy and dangerous by some critics—have as its source this ultimate paternal legacy?
Questioning the intricacies of fiction, which constantly oscillatates between reality and imagination, Rodrigo Fresán's approaches the enigma of the literary vocation in a new light. An invented biography, a gothic novel populated by ghosts, and an evocation of a filial love, Melvill contains all the talent, humor, and immense culture found in the other great works from one of Spanish literature's most ambitious writers.
"Fresán's fictional evocation of Melville's youth is as convincingly realized as Frederick Busch's The Night Inspector (2000), which neatly bookends it. An elegant, meditative story about storytelling—for lives are, Fresán writes, 'really, books of stories.'" —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"[V]isionary...This is a masterpiece." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
This information about Melvill was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Rodrigo Fresán is the author of eleven works of fiction, including Kensington Gardens, Mantra, The Invented Part, winner of the 2018 Best Translated Book Award, and its sequels, The Dreamed Part and The Remembered Part, and, most recently, Melvill. A self-professed "referential maniac," his works incorporate many elements from science fiction (Philip K. Dick in particular) alongside pop culture and literary references. According to Jonathan Lethem, "he's a kaleidoscopic, open-hearted, shamelessly polymathic storyteller, the kind who brings a blast of oxygen into the room." In 2017, he received the Prix Roger Caillois awarded by PEN Club France every year to both a French and a Latin American writer.
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