The Anatomy of Melancholy

Very funny joining this site out of a necessity for an online bookshelf that I don't hate (good news! I like how this site is laid out ^_^) and seeing that I am the very first to both mark this as read and review it. Burton's a Renaissance writer almost concurrent with Shakespeare (Burton wrote before 1616, but his masterpiece first dates from 1621 with several revisions up to his death), and thanks to the Catherine Project this headache of a brick of a book has been my life for about 6 months. This confusing, consuming, logically incoherent, meandering, sometimes utterly brain-numbing book. A book so notorious for its difficulty and singularity that one of the first things scholars, or hypothetical transgender nerds, will describe about the book is how difficult it is to answer succintly a question self-explanatory for the vast majority of books: what are you???

I don't think I quite ever figured that out. The mission is pretty evident, even in the title itself. The book is not an "anatomy", the results of complete dissection and organization. This book is an "anatomy", the process thereof. Melancholy, Burton's personal demon and, as his life progressed, his complete obsession, is to be identified, causes pinpointed and cures explored. If this is a curiously vague mission for an 1100+ page book, then you have just begun to understand the mental frustration me and my group felt. It's laid out in a manner similar to an encyclopedia, but stylistically it's all over the map, in between antiquated medical text, philosophy, something many identify as the first "self-help" text, and a tour through literary history, mythology, stories collected from contemporary pamphlets and newspapers. This book is a fucking mess. A glorious one.

I cannot possibly dispel my thoughts in their entirety here. In fact, I'm working on a personal essay that... will probably have a 5 digit word count the way it's looking. But when this book shines, it is like nothing I have ever come across. For every horribly dated piece of medical or behavioral advice are 4 more that are striking in their timelessness. Burton's articulation seems tuned to the max, squeezing all possible words to create something immense in volume. Burton also finds these incredibly musical stretches of bliss inamomgst his monster, which leaves a lingering impact long after the page has been turned.

If any of this sounds not the most enjoyable, this may not be a book for you. You will struggle with Burton all the way to the end, whether it be his endless digressions, his opaque-ness, the sense of banging your head against the wall as you try to figure out what the fucking point of all this is.

So who is Burton for? I don't think I have an answer to that either, but I know Burton is for me. I've read this thing cover to cover, and I'm still so in the dark, still feel like I've barely uncovered the secrets of the world Burton contained in his life's work. I think these are things I'll wrangle with forever. God, it's glorious.