Resenhas -

Jose.Maltaca 05/02/2019

Quoth the Raven
It is a complicated task to review an entire author’s work, especially Edgar Allan Poe, who has been so praised and so critically acclaimed and who inspired entire generations of writers across the decades. Therefore, I will humble myself and only point out what drew my attention during my reading journey, as well as a couple of observations concerning this particular edition.
In the first place, the book is beautiful: it has a hard cover, it is imbued with a tissue marker and its pages’ borders are silver. And obviously, it contains all of the poems, tales and a novel written by Poe. In a nutshell, this edition is a treat. On the down side, however, the letters are very small and the book itself is extraordinarily heavy – a fact which makes it unpractical for bus readings, for example. All of this is perfectly understandable, given the extensive content it conveys. It is divided in three sections, each containing an aforementioned literary type, about which I will go into further details from now on.
In the first section, there are the poems written by the author. I do not intend to criticize this part of the book, given my small understandings of this literary type. Therefore, I will only point out that many of them give a chilling sensation, an uncomfortable feeling which persists throughout the reading and even a bit after. It is like an unnamed inner struggle to understand which parts of the being are affected. I felt especially unnerved while reading Poe’s most famous poem, ‘The Raven’, as well as ‘The Conqueror Worm’. I know it is a vague idea of the feeling brought by Poe, but by reading it, there can be a further enlightenment of this trait.
For the most part, the tales are superb. Obviously, it is an author’s bibliography, so there are some of them which feel like incomplete or rushed. However, for the most part, the reader embarks on a psychedelic journey throughout the disturbed mind of Poe, who details every single step towards the great final revelation or moment of catharsis. It is every bit as engrossing as one would expect, given his reputation. There are great tales of horror, (‘The Black Cat’, ‘The Death of the Red Masque’, ‘The Cask of Amontillado’) the genesis of the detective fiction genre (with Dupin in ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’, ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’ and ‘The Purloined Letter’) and many other fascinating tales (‘Thou art the Man’, ‘The Gold-Bug’).
There is also an essay named ‘Eureka’, and the great novel ‘The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket’. The former is an attempt at displaying Poe’s views of some cosmological ideas, and the latter is a novel composed by a mixture of horror, adventure and fantasy, and this is such a bleak and weird tale, with so many nuances and dark themes, that it is impossible to dissociate it from Poe’s bibliography, and deem it anything less than brilliant.
The only downside to this book is that sometimes reading it takes a long time, and patience is advisable. Therefore, the only people to whom I would not recommend this book are those who are not willing to cut through some slow-pacing sections, or have problems to read in a nineteenth century language. It is sometimes cumbersome, but I insist: it is totally worth the while. I strongly recommend this masterpiece.