Review: The literary remix trend comes for Moby-Dick and it's a triumph

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Book ReviewCall Me IshmaelleBy Xialou GuoGrove Press, Black Cat: 448 pages, $18If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.“Call me Ishmael.”Considered one of the greatest opening lines in all of literary history, it must have been almost irresistible for the acclaimed novelist Xiaolu Guo to resist using it for the title of her 2025 retelling of the world’s most famous whale tale, “Moby-Dick”.But Guo makes a major change; for in her story, the young and sometimes gloomy male protagonist has been transformed into an adventurous young woman.This has been such a great few years for retellings of the classics — from Barbara Kingsolver’s updated David Copperfield to Salman Rushdie’s zany Don Quixote.

And Percival Everett’s novel “James,” a retelling of Huckleberry Finn, took the lion’s share of the literary prizes in 2024, including the Pulitzer.There is so much pleasure to be had in rereading old favorites — and part of the joy is meeting beloved characters, who have been updated or somehow arrive in a new form to resist old tropes and types.

Guo’s recasting of Ishmaelle is no exception.Orphaned as a teenager in an impoverished fishing village in Kent, Ishmaelle takes to the seas, disguising herself as a boy to do so.

This is not as improbable as it might seem, as there is a long history of women masquerading as men to go journeying into the world.As explained in the note at the end of the book, Guo based her novel’s protagonist on the real diaries of a number of 19th century female sailors.

And as it turns out, the author herself hails from a poor fishing village in southern China, where, as it was in England and America during Melville’s day, it was considered bad luck for a woman to go on board a ship.Guo’s own grandmother never once stepped on board the boat...