This is the strangest, weirdest, queerest book I have ever read. What was Melville thinking? Mardi, and a Voyage Thither, (1849) could also be subtitled as 'The Book that Cost a Career'. After the success of his first two novels, Melville astonished and dismayed his readers with this, his third, effort. During the writing of it, he wrote in a letter to his publisher: Proceeding in my narrative of facts, I began to feel an incurable distaste for the same, and a longing to plume my pinions for a flight, and felt irked, cramped, and fettered by plodding along with dull commonplaces, - so suddenly abandoning the thing altogether, I went to work heart and soul at a romance. Critical reception was almost uniformly negative, Melville's readership declined, and his career never really recovered thereafter. It is probably the least read of Melville's works: it is double the length of either of his first two novels, and practically unreadable in large parts.

It begins well enough, as another sea yarn...

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