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[page 677, column 3, continued:]
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, of Nantucket, North America: comprising the Details of a Mutiny, Famine, and Shipwreck, during a Voyage to the South Seas; resulting in various Extraordinary Adventures and Discoveries in the Eighty fourth Parallel of Southern Latitude. Wiley and Putnam.
FOR those who possess a genuine love of the horrible, here is a rich and luxurious banquet; but let not the fastidious, the squeamish, the hypercritical, presume even to glance at such viands as brother Jonathan has in this instance spread forth; for they are to be digested only by the strongest of stomachs.
In this “Narrative” of Mr. Pym's are many “hair-breadth ‘scapes;” the incidents — some of them — are of a most appalling character; in parts, we find our feelings excited by powerful painting; but, as a whole, the story is very clumsily put together, and the discrepancies are so numerous, and so palpable, that, in its perusal, not even the merest child could be cheated into a belief off the page of truth being before him. For instance, what are we to think of a country (near the South Pole) where everything is white, and where the inhabitants (jet black) have a horror of everything that is white; — where the water is not water, and yet it is water! “At first sight,” we are told,
“It bore resemblance, as regards consistency, to a thick infusion of gum Arabic in common water. But this was only the least remarkable of its extraordinary qualities. It was not colourless, nor was it of any one uniform colour — presenting to the eye, as it flowed, every possible shade of purple, like the hues of a changeable silk. * * * Upon collecting a basinful, and allowing it to settle thoroughly, we perceived that the whole mass of liquid was made up of a number of distinct veins, each of a distinct hue; that these veins did not commingle; and that their cohesion was perfect in regard to their own particles among themselves, and imperfect in regard to neighbouring veins. Upon passing the blade of a knife athwart the veins, the water closed over it immediately, as with us, and also, in withdrawing it, all traces of the passage of the knife were instantly obliterated. If, however, the blade was passed down accurately between two veins, a perfect separation was effected, which the power of cohesion did not immediately rectify.”
Here, and in hundreds of other places, we have not only the improbable but the impossible. It was not thus that De Foe wrote his Robinson Crusoe; it was not in such a spirit that Miss Porter conceived and executed her equally sweet and exquisite fiction of Sir Edward Seaward.
As we have intimated, however, this book will not be without its admirers.
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Notes:
The paragraph quoted is from the end of chapter XVIII.
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[S:0 - NMG, 1838] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Poe Bookshelf - Review of Narrative of A. G. Pym (Anonymous)