In the Library
Melmoth the Wanderer
Charles Maturin, 1820
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Demanding
- Reading time
- Reading time 17 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 39
- Length
- Length 238k words
£1.99
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In the autumn of 1816, John Melmoth, a student in Trinity College, Dublin, quitted it to attend a dying uncle
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- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
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If you like this, try
Faust (Part I)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Faust does the same thing, but keeps its bargain to a single scholar and stage, one soul weighed rather than a whole restless century of victims.
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Doctor Faustus
Christopher Marlowe
Doctor Faustus does the same thing, but crams the whole bargain into one doomed night, counting down the very last hour before the devil collects.
£1.99
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray does the same thing, but shrinks the wanderer endless bargain down to one portrait quietly ageing in a locked room.
£1.99
About the book
A portrait hangs in a decaying Irish house, its paint dark with age, and the eyes in it still seem to move when no one is looking. Charles Maturin's antihero, John Melmoth, bought himself a hundred and fifty extra years of life by selling his soul to the devil, and has spent every one of them roaming the earth for someone more desperate than himself, wretched enough to take the bargain off his hands. He finds them in monastery cells, in Inquisition dungeons, in a madhouse, on a shipwrecked island; story opens inside story, told by strangers to strangers, each one a fresh descent into cruelty wearing the face of piety. And at the worst possible moment in every one, Melmoth makes his offer, and every time it is refused. Maturin writes gothic prose at its most unrestrained, feverish and overgrown, so anxious to be believed it stops mid-scene to footnote a horror as fact. However far a soul is pushed toward the edge of endurance, this novel insists, something in it may still, astonishingly, say no.