The Sea-Wolf
Ratings33
Average rating3.8
Look at me. Forget Hannigram and Sasuke/Naruto or whatever the hell you think is the prototype for toxic homoeroticism. I am going to tell you this once, and I want you to engrave this into your memory: Wolf Larsen and Humphrey Van Weyden are the ancestor of all gay and violent erotic tension.
Wolf Larsen is perhaps one of the best male characters ever conceived of, and were this novel published in the 21st century, I am convinced that young men everywhere would have modeled his behavior after him. His name is WOLF. He's self-educated. He regularly shanghaies people into working for him. He beats the shit out of like five men at once. He beats the shit out of a shark. He engages in philosophical debates, and is described by our narrator as handsome and good-looking, and his physique has our narrator literally speechless. His eyes are beautiful. He makes his own navigational tools. At some point in the book I was expecting Hump to describe the perfect shape of his dick, such was the insanity of the descriptions that Humphrey kept laying down on him.
Humphrey is fine. He's very much an ideological vessel, going up against Larsen's individualistic and violent beliefs, but the great joy in Humphrey's character lays in how utterly besotted he seems with Wolf Larsen, and how utterly he loathes him in equal measure. Larsen favors Van Weyden in a weird sadistic way, and Van Weyden hates him for it, but also takes great pride in his new duties. It's bonkers. The first half of 60% of the book is just them being violent and tense around each other, in between discussions about mortality underpinned by intellectual sexual tension so thick you could cut a knife with it. If the entire book was just this I would've loved it, but unfortunately Maud Brewster arrives, and Humphrey remembers that he's a heterosexual and that women are important, and the rest of the book is spent as Humphrey whines and tries to act masculine for Maud and Wolf Larsen is relegated to the sidelines as a boring and bland romance just...occurs in between Maud and Humphrey.
Now. Do you think this book had women in the early 1900s acting like fujoshis and saying shit like “UGH why did Maud even arrive things were sooo good between Wolf and Hump
Holy crap, I LOVED this experience. Wolf Larsen has joined the lineup of my favorite literary characters.
Classic but ...
Read for book club; entertaining and intriguing to a degree, but not that enjoyable. Wolf Larsen is a fantastic character.
Nietzsche's will to power:
What I am striving to express is this strength itself, more as a thing apart from his physical semblance. It was a strength we are wont to associate with things primitive, with wild animals, and the creatures we imagine our tree-dwelling prototypes to have been—a strength savage, ferocious, alive in itself, the essence of life in that it is the potency of motion, the elemental stuff itself out of which the many forms of life have been moulded; in short, that which writhes in the body of a snake when the head is cut off, and the snake, as a snake, is dead ...
Schopenhauer's will to live:
Without moving and being part of the yeast there would be no hopelessness. But,—and there it is,—we want to live and move, though we have no reason to, because it happens that it is the nature of life to live and move, to want to live and move. If it were not for this, life would be dead. It is because of this life that is in you that you dream of your immortality. The life that is in you is alive and wants to go on being alive for ever. Bah! An eternity of piggishness!