Penguin Classics Confidence Man: Amazon.ca: Herman Melville, Stephen Matterson: Books

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“The great transcendental satire.” —Carl Van Vechten --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Book Description

Onboard the Fidele, a steamboat floating down the Mississippi to New Orleans, a confidence man sets out to defraud his fellow passengers. In quick succession he assumes numerous guises - from a legless beggar and a worldly businessman to a collector for charitable causes and a cosmopolitan' gentleman, who simply swindles a barber out of the price of a shave. Making very little from his hoaxes, the pleasure of trickery seems an end in itself for this slippery conman. Is he the Devil? Is his chicanery merely intended to expose the mercenary concerns of those around him? Set on April Fool's Day, The Confidence-Man (1857) is an engaging comedy of masquerades, digressions and shifting identity, and a devastating satire on the American dream.

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First Sentence
At sunrise on a first of April, there appeared, suddenly as Manco Capac at the lake Titicaca, a man in cream-colours, at the waterside in the city of St Louis. Read the first page

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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover

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Customer Reviews

8 Reviews

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
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Average Customer Review

3.8 out of 5 stars (8 customer reviews)

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5.0 out of 5 stars No Confidence?, Mar 6 2001

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Monty Vierra (Salt Lake City, Utah) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

This review is from: Confidence Man (Paperback)

I take "The Confidence Man" to be a comedy of confused identities and good humor which together help us look at our notions of trust and kindness. A modern example of this level of the story can be found in the film "The Sting". There are other, more subtler things going on in Melville's book that merit more readings, of course, but much of the book can be enjoyed for its seemingly light-hearted look at our willingness to be duped by salesmen and hucksters.

The particular edition that I read seemed to be a re-print of an earlier edition. There is a too-brief introduction to the author and the book. Likewise, there are no notes to help with some of the expressions common in the 19th century but since fallen into disuse in the 21st. For example, when one of the confidence men refers to his "father's friend, James Hall, the judge", I wondered if Melville was referring to his own father-in-law, who was a judge. Hall, it turns out, was a writer whose 1835 book "Sketches..." was one of Melville's sources.

A good "companion" to The Confidence Man and other Melville works is The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, edited by R. S. Levine. And readers interested in pursuing the author in more depth will find fascinating reading in Leviathan, A Journal of Melville Studies.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Melville's Enigmatic American Testament., Jun 7 2000

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mp - See all my reviews

This review is from: Penguin Classics Confidence Man (Paperback)

With "The Confidence-Man," Melville offered a final novelistic expression of his hopes, doubts, and frustrations about the American nation on the verge of Civil War in the late 1850's.

Many critics and reviewers take a negative point of view on this novel, saying that the narrative instability and episodic nature of the novel represents Melville's anger with the increasingly poor reception of his later novels, including the brilliant "Moby-Dick".

Over the course of the novel's first half, we are presented with a string of characters who spout the virtues of charity and trust, all supposedly different manifestations of one Confidence-Man. The confidence-man engages passengers of the riverboat Fidele from St. Louis to New Orleans in philosophical, literary, personal, and business-related conversations. This is the heart of the novel, even in the second half, where only one confidence-man appears. As in Cervantes' "Don Quixote," you are able to tease out more about the ambiguous purposes of the novel through speeches rather than actions.

At points amusing, horrifying, and sad, "The Confidence-Man" is difficult, if not impossible to categorize in any simple fashion. An extremely worthwhile read, especially if you read it as a prophetic work of the American Civil War and try to figure out for yourself if Melville thought things would turn out alright, or if the US was due for an apocalyptic judgment.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Melville's Least Understood Masterpiece, Feb 17 2000

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John Fischer "bookaholic43" (Houston) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

This review is from: Penguin Classics Confidence Man (Paperback)

The Confidence Man is without question the most revolutionary work of nineteenth century fiction--enormously experimental, provocative and simply bizarre. The experimentations with flatenned characterizations; the episodic, even repetitive plot structure; and the sheer power of its hallucinatory narration make this novel a post-modern work before there was even modernism. Greatly ignored in its own day, and for much of ours, the Confidence Man is central to an understanding of narrative history and the evolution of this tortured genius who, after his novel Pierre, seems to have transformed narrative conventions in a way that few readers have ever grasped. A brilliant, absolutely central work that makes the much-lauded experimentations of near-contemporary American writers seem puny by comparison.

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Most recent customer reviews

1.0 out of 5 stars Horrible and overrated
This is like a precurser to the Beat movement of the 1950's. The sentences are overly long, it's written like a police report so you become overly aware that there is a narrator... Read more

Published on April 15 2003 by Timothy L. Atkinson

3.0 out of 5 stars An above average work by a great author
If you love Melville, then I suggest this book with little reservation. It is not an easy read, however, and is often bogged down by long discourses. Read more

Published on April 30 2001 by M. Sclafani