Very busy this week, but thankful to Amateur Reader for reminding me of one of my former favorite Edgar Allan Poe stories, which I had completely forgotten the existence of. (Yes, that worries me too.) “Descent into the Maelström” really does have some of Poe’s best descriptive writing”—and it’s sea-related, too!
Here the vast bed of the waters, seamed and scarred into a thousand conflicting channels, burst suddenly into phrensied convulsion—heaving, boiling, hissing—gyrating in gigantic and innumerable vortices, and all whirling and plunging on to the eastward with a rapidity which water never elsewhere assumes, except in precipitous descents.
That’s funny. A few years ago I was grumping about Poe’s bad prose, and meine Frau said “What about Descent into the Maelström,” and I said “I should read that” and then it turned out that I already had.
This is one of the Poe stories where the narrator’s clinical tone doesn’t match events. All of these terrible things happen, and he sounds like he presenting the results of a lab experiment. Unsettling.
[...] 2008 Reading ← Descent into Real Life [...]
[...] short and a long post on [...]