In 'Call Me Ishmaelle,' Xiaolu Guo reimagines Herman Melville's classic 'Moby-Dick' through the eyes of a teenage orphan named Ishmaelle. After escaping a life in a factory by disguising herself as a boy, Ishmaelle joins a whaling crew led by a brooding captain fixated on avenging his encounter with a great white whale. With richly drawn parallels to the original narrative, the story explores themes of friendship, adventure, and the quest for identity amidst the harsh realities of whaling life.
Now she finds herself in a crew captained by a morose, reclusive, peg-legged man, who is monomaniacally obsessed with finding and killing the great white whale which maimed him.
Ishmaelle is compelled to share a bed at an inn with a Polynesian harpooner who has spent his day hawking a shrunken head around town.
More generally, she sticks to the outlines of Herman Melville's plot; we are heading to the same doom by the same route.
Every fan of Moby-Dick will recognise the character Queequeg, and though Guo renames him Kauri and pares away some of the broad comedy and exoticising detail.
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