Melmoth The Masterpiece

It took me three, maybe four, months to get through Melmoth. It was actually a really good book to think about, so like a good meal, it needed to be savored, not devoured.

The author was a great word smith; his sentences, complex. He layered two stories inside two or more other stories, so his plotting was equally so...

I think there's little doubt that he sympathized with Melmoth, but he, the author (Charles Maturin - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Maturin) was apparently a god fearing Anglo-Irish Protestant Clergyman - and Melmoth by comparison was supposed to be the embodiment of Satan on the face of the earth...

Of course there were many pages in which it appeared the Catholic Church in Spain was equally an embodiment of Satan. There was a propagandist voice in some of his Catholic railings, but it should be noted that Melmoth was from Ireland, and not Spain, and his religion, or upbringing there-in, was never alluded too; that said, the contemporary Melmoth's (or Melmoth) religion sounded protestant... that said, the Spain of the late 15th, 16th, 17th centuries was probably about as good a definition of Satan as you might conjure up.

Somewhere early on in the reading, (I have no patience to find it now...), one of his characters, perhaps the Spaniard (though there are many...), mentions something about torture, and then something about the worst torture, which he identifies as the 'water' torture. I had to flip back to the beginning to make sure it was written in the 19th century; water torture being in the news and all... something of a 21st century thing...

I just went looking for an on-line version, thinking maybe I could find the 'water' torture reference. I could not. I did find, interestingly enough, Maturin was the uncle of Oscar Wilde's mother. And that '... after his trial, Wilde adopted the name Sebastian Melmoth' (http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O54-MelmoththeWanderer.html) (I see someone is competing with Wikipedia...).

(Incomplete post...)