Name: Melmoth the Wanderer
ISBN: 9780140447613

Charles Maturin

Created by an Irish clergyman, Melmoth is one of the most fiendish characters in literature. In a satanic bargain, Melmoth exchanges his soul for immortality. The story of his tortured wanderings through the centuries is pieced together through those who have been implored by Melmoth to take over his pact with the devil. Influenced by the Gothic romances of the late 18th century, Maturin's diabolic tale raised the genre to a new and macabre pitch. Its many admirers include Poe, Balzac, Oscar Wilde and Baudelaire.

Melmoth the Wanderer

Charles Robert Maturin

This violent, profound, baroque and blackly humorous novel is the story of Melmoth, who has sold his soul in exchange for immortality in a satanic bargain, and now preys on the helpless in their darkest moments, offering to ease their suffering if they will take his place and release him from his centuries of tortured wanderings. Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) blended Gothic fiction and psychological realism to create a work of hallucinatory power.

Lily

Charles Maturin is certainly overshadowed by some of his contemporaries who dabbled in Gothic and romantic literature, such as Mary Shelley. This is why when I received this book as a gift, I only had a vague memory of having encountered the the title somewhere, and had not heard anything about the author. This is amusing to me now, as he seems to have had numerous connections to some of my favorite authors, being a close friend and correspondent of Walter Scott and Oscar Wilde's great-uncle (Wilde is definitely inspired by his Melmoth in writing Dorian Gray). Maturin knew very well what he wanted to write when he was working on Melmoth the Wanderer; His intention was to produce one the most harrowing works of Gothic horror, and he succeeded. 

Melmoth is truly a Gothic novel; by which I mean that it contains almost all of the literary conventions of this genre. It is full of complicated and intertwined narratives describing terrible and fantastic adventures that traverse several countries and gothic setting. Tales within stories and stories within anecdotes. Subterranean passages, burial vaults and prisons of Catholic monasteries. It is rife with violence, tyranny and oppression. Melmoth is a faceless satanic figure but also a romantic hero of sorts (an outcast, a victim, a rebel). In Faustian fashion, he has sold his soul for knowledge and power. Cursed to wander the earth, he will only be free to die if another being takes his place, exchanging his powers and cursed condition for their mundane sufferings. As he roams the earth, ghostly and unhinged, we follow him through hearsay, recounted by the mortals who have met him against the backdrop of all the darkness and misery the book has to offer: A relentless chain of cruel events without purpose, unity or meaning, an yet inescapable, as is the human condition. Suffering is all there is.

Depending on what you expect from such a book, it may surprise you that this novel offers no conventional novelistic escape or morals; only the pervasive horrors and pains of a Gothic world. It's a truly cynical novel, and I enjoyed it immensely. Having said this, I can't truly recommend it to anyone but the most avid readers of Gothic literature. It's a long and heavy book full of nested narratives and intertwined tales. The plot (if it can be called a plot) is non-linear and traverses time and space, like Melmoth himself. The pages are dense with descriptions of Gothic settings and the musings of characters are laden with heavy vocabulary. But if you are up for a Gothic challenge, you will not be disappointed.

Melmoth the Wanderer

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