The Whispering Muse

One of the nice things about family or friends traveling to foreign countries is that sometimes they'll bring you books back, which is how I acquired The Whispering Muse.

This novel by Sjon tracks the journey of Valdimar Haraldsson, an eccentric Icelander who possess unorthodox theories of human origins and development. Haraldsson had published a journal called Fisk og Kultur, which detailed

". . .my chief preoccupation, the link between fish consumption and the superiority of the Nordic race."

 Through writing a letter of condolence after the death of a friend, our protagonist is invited on a cruise of a merchant ship owned by the friend's father. The second mate on the ship happens to be the mythological figure Caeneus, and thus our story begins.

Haraldsson is an absolute bore -- his chief preoccupation aboard the ship is the lack of fish on the gourmet menu he's served at dinner. After dinner, his companions eagerly await the stories Caeneus tells every night, which are retellings of his heroic deeds while sailing on the Argo with Jason.

Sjon alternates between Haraldsson's banal observations and thoughts (in which Haraldsson displays lack of comprehension and insight) and Caeneus' increasingly involved mythological ramblings.

Despite (or perhaps because of) Haraldsson's banality, this isn't designed to be a realistic novel, although it isn't magic realism, either. We get several minor plot points that are raised and not expanded upon, and other plot threads that are simply dropped. The resolution is abrupt, and not quite satisfying.

I'd heard this compared to the works of Italo Calvino, and while I wouldn't put it at the same quality, I can see the resemblance. A quick read.

McSweeney's 41

McSweeney's 41 is a collection of short stories, short non-fiction, and some work by Australian Aboriginal writers. I was worried that this would be uneven, but that's not the case at all -- everything in here is top notch.

The first story in here is a Thomas McGuane account of a fishing camp in the wilderness, with two former best friends who are well on their way to becoming estranged. It's depressing and darkly funny.

McGuane is the only author here I was previously familiar with (although I do recall seeing review for the novel excerpted here, John Brandon's A Million Heavens), but everything here is polished.

Other stories I'd single out for praise are Aimee Bender's "Wordkeepers", Jess Walter's "The Wolf and the Wild,", and Ryan Boudinot's "Robot Sex."

The non-fiction ("A Land Rush in Iran" and "What Happens After Sixteen Years in Prison?") are both well done, if a little meandering.

Finally, the four short stories from Australian Aboriginal writers (Tony Birch's "The Promise, Ellen van Neerven-Currie's "S&J", Tara June Winch's "It's Too Difficult to Explain" and Melissa Lucashenko's "Tonsils") are more than worth additions to this collection -- they're as good or better as anything that came before them in this work.

A Random Walk Down Wall Street

There's a lot of information in A Random Walk Down Wall Street, but all that information really boils down to "no investment strategy can reliably beat the S&P 500 index over a long period of time." Malkiel provides numerous examples of this, over a time period ending in 1998. (It's too bad that either there isn't an updated edition through the most recent financial crisis, or the edition I have is older.)

Of course, that's not all that's in this book -- there's a history of some famous financial bubbles (Dutch tulips, British East India Company, the US Stock Market in 1929), and a general primer on the various investment vehicles and financial instruments available. The author also includes contact information for various investment houses, which would be much more useful if this book wasn't fifteen years old.

This seems to be a useful primer on the stock market and investing. I don't really know enough about the subject to recommend it unreservedly, but it seems to be worth paging through for a general understanding of the issues.

The Assignment

Reading the foreword to The Assignment, I reached a passage that made me cringe:

The work is described as "a novella in twenty-four sentences." What accounts for this stylistic idiosyncrasy? In her autobiographical account Charlotte Kerr tells us that, while they were both still thinking about projects based on Bachmann's novel, the couple sat one evening over a bottle of wine, listening to Glenn Gould's performance of the first half of Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier I. When the last of the twenty-four movements had ended, Durrenmatt rose, turned off the record player, replaced the LP in its case, and said, "So, now I'm going to write the story in twenty-four sentences." (The German word for a musical movement is Satz, which also means "sentence".)

The writer of the foreword goes on to expand on the relation of Durrenmatt to Bach, on music to prose, et cetera. It's not that I object to drawing inspiration from other art forms, or  the relation of a style of writing to a style of music, it's that a self-imposed limitation such as the above would seem to lead to a rambling form of stream-of-consciousness that would be tedious to process and absorb. Fortunately, this is not the case; I found The Assignment to be easier reading that the works of Jose Saramago, who often employs a similar style of pages and pages of one sentence. So while each of the twenty-four chapters here is one sentence only, many are extremely short, (the first three are only two pages each), and even the longer ones remain digestible.

This is an odd novel -- the subtitle is "On the observing of the observer by the observed." This is perhaps best illustrated by the anecdote told by our protagonist's friend, the logician D.: that his house is on a mountain, and he often catches tourists observing it with binoculars, while he in turn watches through his telescope. When they seem him observing them, they become upset and withdraw. Some return later and throw rocks. Everyone in the novel is both observing and observed, and the way this is portrayed in the climax gives that moment a bit of a comic tone. It's an unsettling and easy read.

The Dream Master

This has sat on my shelf for awhile, because although I'm a huge Zelazny fan, I didn't much like the short story that this novel is based on ("He Who Shapes"). It's not that it isn't an interesting premise (it is), or that the prose is pedestrian (it isn't, although I wouldn't say that this is one of Zelazny's better written works), it's mostly that the characters are forceful people without being that interesting. Render, the protagonist, is a condescending asshole, and Eileen Shallot, the other major character, isn't all that sketched out; she's blind, she's strong-willed, she's a doctor.

The premise of the novel is at least interesting -- Render is a neuroparticipant therapist, one who can guide a patient's dreams using a specialized device (called the egg, and descriptions of it echo a return to the womb). Eileen Shallot is training as a psychiatrist, and would like to be a neuroparticipant as well, but due to her blindness, she'd need to become acclimated to sight. She seeks out Render, a leader in the field, in order to become acclimated. After some reluctance (and despite the warnings of his colleagues), he accepts. (It doesn't hurt that she's apparently quite attractive). Everything progresses apace, until we get a confrontation that forces the ending sequence -- which is the most interesting rendering in the novel, even if it feels forced and inconsistent.

Unfortunately, we don't get too many sessions where Render is shaping dreams -- there's a sequence in the beginning, to introduce the technique, and one where Render is recalling a past experience. The sessions with Eileen consist of him accustoming her to colors, landscapes, textures, their surroundings, et cetera. The ending sequence is certainly something, however, and arguably pays the whole technique off.

I suppose my biggest issue with The Dream Master is that Zelazny is trying to write something with echoes of the Greek -- here's a great man brought down by a tragic flaw. But Render doesn't approach greatness (brilliance, yes, but not greatness), and barely manages to rise to likeable. So while his tragic flaw may be arrogance, he's not lacking others, and that's just one reason this is unsatisfying.

Vampires in the Lemon Grove

My first impression of the title story in Karen Russell's Vampires in the Lemon Grove was something approaching awe -- this was a novel premise, beautifully executed, well-written. Russell uses the backdrop of vampires who've settled in a small town in Italy to show a couple falling out of love. It's a great story, and probably the best in the collection.

Of the other stories in the collection, "Reeling for the Empire" is nearly as good, and "Proving Up" is truly creepy. "The Seagull Army Descends on Strong Beach, 1979" and "The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis" are both coming-of-age stories set amidst unsettling conceits. "The Barn at the End of Our Term" seems a little aimless and "Dougbert Shackleton's Rules for Antarctic Tailgating" has its funny moments but doesn't really rise to a point. "The New Veterans" has an interesting premise, but really lags in the middle. And the pre-middle. And the post-middle.

This made me want to seek out more of Karen Russell's work -- she puts her characters in odd environments, gives them fantastic (in the literal sense) stimuli, and in that she almost reminds me of Ray Bradbury.

The Burning Plain

The Burning Plain is a classic of Mexican literature, and I can certainly see why. These short stories are all sparse, yet powerful.

Each is short -- some are practically anecdotes. Others are apparently internal monologues. Others are dialogues that read like one person is imagining what the other would say. They build and slowly reveal.

In "The Hill of the Comadres", the narrator opens the story by stating that two of his friends are dead. As he continues, he eventually confesses to killing one of them, but even that seems almost tangential to his recollections. It's about despair, loneliness, deterioration of a community.

"We're Very Poor" is summed up in its first sentence: "Everything is going from bad to worse here."

"Luvina" almost seems like it doesn't fit here. Not that it's a bad story, but it seems tinged with fantasy, like a bad dream. It reminded me of Roberto Bolaño, although if I'd done my homework Bolaño would remind me of Rulfo.

"Anacleto Morones" is the longest in the collection,  and almost seems like an extended setup for a dirty joke.

My favorite story in the collection? Probably "The Burning Plain", which is also the most straightforward, I think. Least straightforward? "The Man."

This is something to revisit, although probably not all at once.

Confessions of an English Opium Eater and Other Writings

I couldn't find a picture of my particular copy of this book on Google, so I had to take a picture and upload it. Personally, I think that this cover is much more interesting than many of the other cover designs out there.

This particular edition contains Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Suspiria de Profundis, The English Mail Coach, and three essays: "On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts", "On the Knocking on the Gate in Macbeth", and "The Literature of Knowledge, the Literature of Power." It's quite a bit to digest in reading straight through, but taken separately, each section is worth the read.

As might be expected in such a narrative, Confessions of an English Opium Eater has DeQuincey repeatedly emphasizing his station in life, the fact that he is a learned scholar, and that he came to opium for relief of pain only, and resorted to more frequent usage again for pain relief, before the drug finally put its hooks into him. However, despite his occasionally too frequent protestations, this is a very strong section of the work, and well worth revisiting. A criticism frequently leveled at the Confessions are that they glorify and condone the use of opium, that they encourage addiction, but I didn't quite get that; given the subject matter, DeQuincey's praise of opium is less full-throated than I had expected.

Suspiria de Profundis is nominally a sequel to the Confessions, but is a much more abstract work. After an expansion on his childhood and a digression on the human brain, DeQuincey moves into what can only be assumed to be dreams/visions while under the influence of opium. These are, as might be expected, unreal and extravagant. I would recommend "The Dark Interpreter" and "Levana and our Ladies of Sorrow."

The English Mail Coach begins with a very straightforward section, called "The Glory of Motion", extolling the virtues of being a passenger on a Royal Mail Coach. We then have a meditation on sudden death, a retelling of an incident that DeQuincey observed as a passenger on the Mail, and finally, opium dreams about said incident. A very well done essay.

"On Murder" is the highlight of the essays, and is more of a description of some crimes rather than an exaltation of them, which is fine, but a slight disappointment given (again) the author's protestations that this is really a satire, totally, and how could you indict him for it?

Recommended, although more individually than straight through.

Stand on Zanzibar

The first chapter of Stand on Zanzibar is an introduction to a newsmagazine-type program that will recur throughout the novel. The second is titled "Read the Directions" and intersperses bare bones characterization (such as: "Donald Hogan is a spy") with excerpts from in-universe books, newscasts, advertisements, corporate mottoes, gossip, and recruitment. Every character introduced in that chapter is featured in the novel, some more prominently than others. It's a device designed to simulate the information overload that's prevalent in the setting of this novel -- Earth, 40 years from time of writing (that is, 2010, with the novel written in 1969).

The remainder of the novel is like an expanded version of the first chapter; the main plot is interwoven with ads, snippets of talk shows, and the like. It can be a bit jarring. Additionally, of all the characters introduced in the first chapter, some get an expanded look, while others only get one or two -- an intro chapter that sets up their conflict, and the resolution chapter. However, due to the cutting in, introducing the new characters isn't too distracting, and we're left wondering if any of them are going to join the main plot (most of them wind up tangential to it), or even what the main plot is.

While the plot is the engine that drives the book, I would recommend picking this up for the structure, as the ending is pretty facile, even if the big reveal is a bit unusual.

The Song of the Dodo

Although the narrative in David Quammen's The Song of the Dodo is sprawling and peripatetic, the author's focus is not. While Quammen jumps between focusing on others' research (either in the field, in their offices, or in scientific journals), visiting sites himself (both with and not in conjunction with field biologists) and generally waxing on the topic, he's always engaging, and is always able to relate what that particular tidbit has to do with island biogeography.

The Song of the Dodo isn't focused on the dodo at all. Sure, our favorite wacky looking fowl does make a few appearances, but really, this is a paean to Alfred Russell Wallace. The book begins and closes with an account of Wallace's journeys to the South Pacific, with the ending of the author retracing Wallace's footsteps. Between those bookends, we have discussion of conservation, the pressures that isolated habitats (such as islands) exert on evolution (here we have many examples, from insects to birds to mammals to reptiles, covering island gigantism, insular dwarfism, species evolving to fill niches that are typically filled by other species, and much more), how the theory of island biogeography can be used to inform the design of nature reserves (and if this is a proper use for the theory), the treatment of Aboriginal people in Australia, the "right" amount of species for a particular island (and how this is achieved through migrations and extinctions), and much more.

I would recommend this unreservedly to anyone interested in natural history or biology in general.

Murder City

Murder City isn't quite what I expected. Rather than a sober overview of Mexico's troubles, this is a depressing narrative that skips between scenes and characters, like a bad dream. Murders without motive, seemingly without reason, without explanations, and certainly without consequences for the killers.

Throughout Murder City, Bowden uses jump cuts -- he describes a murder, a threat, an incident, in a paragraph and then flashes to another, and another, before returning (or moving) to a something else. The referenced instances may recur, or may not. One thread that runs through nearly all of them, though, is that witnesses or neighbors saw or noticed nothing, or saw men "dressed as commandos."

Bowden has several people and settings he returns to again and again, but the three most prevalent are the story of a former beauty queen who came to the city to party, was gang-raped for days and lost her mind (Miss Sinaloa), a killer for one of the cartels (Murder Artist), and the intimidation and silencing of the Mexican press by both the cartels and the government (Dead Reporter Driving). These are the only chapters that are titled, others are merely denoted by the page breaks.

Overall, this book doesn't give a sense of perspective on the violence in Ciudad Juarez, but underscores the senselessness of it all. And that is precisely the point.

The Man-Eaters of Tsavo

This book could be more accurately titled East African Adventures, Including that Time I Killed Two Man-Eating Lions, but that might be too conversational (and not nearly Victorian enough) for Col. Patterson. There are twenty-seven chapters in this book, and the ninth one is titled "The Death of the Second Man-Eater", so the majority of this book is clearly the other East African adventures. Luckily, Patterson's writing style is engaging enough that even without the excitement of the lions, it's not bad going.

I doubt that Patterson saw this work getting the audience that it eventually would -- in the brief preface, he states that he wrote this for the benefit of the friends who kept insisting that he put his escapades down on paper. The most famous (and interesting) of Patterson's adventures in Africa is his time building a railway in Kenya (then British East Africa) which was set upon by maneless lions (the man-eaters of the title) who dragged off many workers, to the point where the laborers refused to work on the railway, and many deserted. Patterson devoted much of his time at night to waiting for the lions, progressing to hunting them, finally having one stalk him. He eventually kills them and eliminates the threat, although not before many of his men are eaten. It's a fascinating, terrifyingly primal story, and Patterson renders it laconically, not really conveying the fear or sense of urgency, even though he himself lived it.

The remainder of the book is railway engineering, hunting in East Africa (rhino, hippo, many other lions, antelope, elephant, giraffe, etc). It's never all that boring, because it's easy to digest, but it does get a tad repetitive. The story of the lions is worth reading. The rest? Eh.

Gentlemen's Blood

Barbara Holland's Gentlemen's Blood is not quite a comprehensive overview of dueling and its history, but an excellent introductory look at a past custom that we currently look a little askance at.

Holland begins with the duel's origins in the trial by combat, and moves deftly through the centuries (from fencing masters in Italy to swordfighting in France to dueling pistols in England to bloody frontier affairs in the American West, with stops in between in Ireland, the American South, Russia, and Germany, among other places). Given the breadth of the subject matter (dueling was an accepted custom in many cultures, and although it was deplored and illegal at various times, laws against it were very often not enforced), Holland doesn't quite treat the subject exhaustively, but her digressions make this well worth reading. There's plenty of information on how honor was treated (as the currency of polite society), how exactly a duel should be arranged (by the seconds, via a series of notes), the insults most likely to bring about a challenge ("liar" is the most unforgivable, right up with physical violence, which either requires a challenge or renders the aggressor beneath contempt, depending on the culture), and the capabilities of the weapons involved (smoothbore pistols weren't particularly accurate).

There's a lot here, but Holland is most entertaining in her snapshot-like depictions of the many duels, spotlighting combats across countries and centuries. Her eye is sharp, and her wit is acerbic. Highly recommended, it's a quick and entertaining read.

The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake

Don't judge a book by its cover, or an author by his appellation. I saw "Breece D'J Pancake" and cringed. I figured I knew exactly why someone would choose to do that, and exactly what kind of stories they would write. Luckily, I was way off; from reading the afterword (or one of them, anyway), I learned that the awful punctuation was the fault of the first magazine that published one of Pancake's stories, and he kept it, because why not? Secondly, these stories aren't precious and tedious at all.

The first story in this collection, "Trilobites" is one of the best short stories I've ever read. Some critics, (like Joyce Carol Oates, on the freaking cover of my edition, and at least one of the fore and afterwords) liken Pancake to Hemingway, and while I can see it, I don't think that's wholly accurate. Hemingway is just more sparse than Pancake is -- Hemingway's protagonists seem more detached. The rest of the collection is quite strong, as well. Sure, there are ebbs and flows (the foreword singles out the gothic "Time and Again" as an ebb), but the stories remain inventive and haunting. Recommended unreservedly.

That said, while this is great writing, it isn't always fun reading. These are depressing stories about lost and desperate people, the kind who "have lost a wheel, fallen off a biplane wing, or crossed yourself left-handedly . . .". Pancake doesn't let his characters blur together -- sure, these are miserable people, but they all have very different reasons and circumstances, and he's not going to let you forget that.

Pym

Mat Johnson's Pym is many things; sure, it's a satirical novel on race in America, both our obsession with it and how it drives American society, but it's also a fun fantasy novel that can be read entirely without context (here, I'm thinking of a sheltered twelve year old, hundreds of years from now, because it's tough of me to conceive of someone reading this and missing the overtones and allusions)

Pym opens with the protagonist, Chris Jaynes, having just been denied tenure at a historically white college in upstate NY (here, I picture something like Bard, or New Paltz) because despite being the sole black male professor, he doesn't behave as he is expected to. That is, he doesn't join the school's diversity committee, and he'd rather teach the whole canon of American literature, rather than just African-American literature.

Immediately after his firing, Jaynes is thrown a bone -- a slave narrative that confirms the truth of Edgar Allen Poe's only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Purportedly written by Pym's companion on his voyage, Dirk Peters (the man selling the manuscript interjects, "Who ever heard of a black man named 'Dirk'?", which is a question that could be raised about Jaynes' childhood friend, Garth) the manuscript offers insight into both the mysterious ending of Poe's novel, as well as events leading up to it. Jaynes immediately attempts to venture to Antarctica to confirm, enlisting the help of a his cousin (a marine entrepreneur), and an ex-girlfriend (a lawyer).

When the makeshift crew Jaynes hastily assembles arrives in Antarctica, Pym really hits its stride. With the progression of the plot, the racial satire is ratcheted up, and the parallels with Poe's novel shine through. Pym's progression even includes a similar ambiguous ending.

My edition concludes with sixteen discussion questions, which I'm not going to get into here. I would recommend this novel, even if you haven't read Poe's. While I did, and I thought my experience was enhanced because of this, it isn't strictly necessary.

Neuromancer

What can I say about Neuromancer that hasn't been said already? It's one of those novels that nearly any description is going to use either "seminal" or "groundbreaking". Not to say this isn't a good novel -- it is, I'd compare it favorably to any of the sci-fi I'd read recently -- but reading something like this nearly 30 (!) years after it was published, one tends to focus on where the author's vision of the future lacks verisimilitude, rather than where he was eerily prescient.

Despite the above, Neuromancer still retains its power. Worth picking up.

One of the necessary settings in a novel like this is an unpoliced Wild West area, where drugs and technology flow freely, and the opening setting of Chiba City in Japan may be the archetype of that.

The opening setting of Chiba City in Japan, a world of drugs, gangs, nightclubs, arcades, with little to no police presence could be the model for this genre; a Wild West-type area is needed in cyberpunk, and this certainly is it. Our protagonist, Case, is an archetype, too. So is our enforcer, Molly. While the plot may not be too unusual, the overall goal is an interesting one.

Again, Neuromancer is absolutely worthwhile, particularly for its treatment of artificial intelligence.

The Windup Girl

Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl reminds me why I love science fiction, I think. It's set a few hundred years in a not totally implausible future, and contains an inventive plot, memorable characters, an immersive setting, and a denouement leaving room for a sequel, if necessary. Unfortunately, the "not totally implausible" future seems almost alarmist on Bacigalupi's part -- "if we're not vigilant, something like this could happen", as opposed to cyberpunk dystopias, which just seem to be, rather than requiring the downward spiral that the world of The Windup Girl does.

Bacigalupi's future Bangkok is richly detailed and imagined. The fruits of genetic engineering are seamlessly integrated without too much exposition, and the future Thai political structure is unfolded slowly, over the course of a few chapters. With a world like this, there's a lot of attention to be paid to setting, and our author does a good job there.

Plot-wise, The Windup Girl skips between several diverse characters working towards different ends. Some of them see the situation more clearly than others, and of course there's some information asymmetry there. The ending isn't totally satisfying, more of a setup to a sequel, but it resolves nearly all the plot threads.

The Windup Girl  is a fun, well-plotted science fiction novel. Is that enough to overcome the slight preachiness of the environmental message? Is it possible to write a novel in this setting without having it come across as slightly preachy? Would anyone write a novel in this setting that isn't intended to be preachy? Regardless of the answers to those questions, this is certainly a book worth picking up.

More than Human

One of the problems of reading groundbreaking works years after they've received their acclaim is that what they brought to the table can seem a little routine. This is unfortunately the case with Theodore Sturgeon's More than Human, which may have seemed revolutionary when it was first published, but now seems like merely a very good science fiction novel.

More than Human isn't a typical sci-fi novel; like Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, it concerns the next phase of human evolution. Like Clarke, Sturgeon focuses on the unlocking of the potential of the human mind -- telepathy, teleportation, telekinesis, mind control, things of that nature. They're very different novels, though, and I would say Clarke's is more interesting in its setup, while Sturgeon's is better in execution.

More than Human is composed of three parts -- "The Fabulous Idiot", "Baby is Three", and "Morality." "Baby is Three" was a previously published novella, and the preceding and anteceding parts were composed solely for the novel. I enjoyed "The Fabulous Idiot" the most, because it's the most straightforward -- the later two can be a little unclear, and demand that a lot of the action happen "offscreen", without necessarily even hinting at the general direction.

There are times when Sturgeon's prose, set pieces, and dialogue seem a little dated, even for something that was written in the 1950s. That said, the concept is novel for the time, and the execution is good.

It's tough to level too much criticism at a novel you've enjoyed, especially when it's critically acclaimed. I don't want to give the impression that this is a bad novel, or something to be avoided. Any reader of fifties sci-fi should absolutely pick it up. It's tough to see this as something that took science fiction into the mainstream, or that took science fiction into the arena of literature, but given the way the subject matter is handled, I can see it if I squint.

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

Edgar Allen Poe's only novel can be a bit difficult to digest, despite Poe's limpid prose and straightforward style; it's a novel that swings through genres in a way to render characterizing it as nearly futile. What begins as an adventure at sea becomes horror, a false document, before ending in a kind of mystic symbolism that the heavy-handed notes in my copy chalk up to Poe's grief over the death of his mother and brother. (At left is not my copy, but since I couldn't find the correct image in a suitable size, I just picked what I thought was the best looking image on GIS)

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (I'm going to leave off its more than one hundred word subtitle (!) here) begins relatively simply: it's the cobbled-together journal of our eponymous protagonist (he didn't keep a proper journal on his adventures, and Poe, among others, supposedly coaxed him to write up his memoirs, as they contain numerous singular anecdotes) Our hero is a young man, living in New England, whose bosom friend convinces him to stow away on his father's brig, which is headed for a voyage to the South Seas. Once a safe distance away from port, our hero is to emerge, when it would be inconvenient to turn back. Of course, fate intervenes, and what had been a simple plan becomes Pym narrowly escaping death over the course of several separate events.

My copy of this work (Penguin Classics. Let no one say I'm highbrow) has a series of (over the top) notes, which mostly amount to calling attention repeatedly to slightly repeated passages, pointing our what source Poe is working from (Pym works heavily with verisimilitude, so he used several real travelogues* as sources for Pym).

* at least one of these has serious questions about its accuracy, in that the author's path would have taken him over the Antarctic continent. So either there are errors of navigation, or . . .

However, three interesting points raised by the notes are 1) that the novel has mirror-like qualities (certain lines occur equidistant from the middle of the book, and the exact middle of the book features two facing mirrors 2) the possible connection of events in the book to Poe's personal life, in that details that may call to mind the life and death of his mother and brother, and 3) the interpretation of the ending. Pym's ending is abrupt and ambiguous: a "note" afterwards explains that Pym died before he could complete his narrative, although he was nearing the end. Since Pym is an invented character, this is clearly not the case, and has led to scholars debating the meaning and symbolism of the ending. As far as Poe goes, this isn't quite a horror story, but it's definitely gripping and worth a look.