Reviews and Comments

Imagine Frankenstein, but without the humanity, poetry and relatability.

Would be more appropriately titled “The Limits of Empathy, and by empathy I mean feeling others’ pain and joy, not understanding others’ pain and joy”. The author’s not really against empathy but feels we should use less emotion and more reason in making decisions. That’s really it. Not really as radical as the title suggests.

Having remained popular over the course of 170 years, I expected great things of this book. However, it was an absolute trudge. I’d heard it was the story of a man’s monomaniacal and ultimately doomed quest for revenge, well that probably makes up about 10% of the book, enough for a decent short story. The rest is a slog through tediously detailed descriptions of whaling in the mid-19th century. If that’s what you came for, you’re in luck. If you were after characters and an engaging plot, I don’t think this is the place.

I recognise that this is pretty popular, so there’s clearly something I’m missing. But if you’re 100 pages in and hoping it gets better, put it down, it doesn’t.

Meh. I couldn't say it's badly written, but I just never found myself very interested or engaged. At times, it feels as though it's building up to something, the thing that's going to make everything fall into place and change your way of thinking. But no, that same sense of emptiness and indifference in the first couple of hundred pages carries on right to the end. It's not like it's terrible, but I imagine I'll have forgotten everything about it in a couple of weeks.