Which novel begins with the line 'Call me Ishmael'?

Moby-Dick, and the three words are doing more than they appear to. Call me Ishmael is not my name is Ishmael - the narrator is asking to be addressed by a name rather than claiming it, and Ishmael in Genesis is the outcast son sent into the wilderness. The book announces in three words that its narrator is a wanderer using an assumed name.

It failed completely. It sold badly, the British edition accidentally omitted the epilogue - so reviewers complained that a first-person narrator had implausibly died along with everyone else - and Melville's reputation collapsed. He spent his last nineteen years as a customs inspector on the New York docks and died in 1891 largely forgotten, with an obituary that misspelled the title of his own book.

The revival came in the 1920s, a full generation later, and the thing that had made it unsellable is what made it modern: it stops being a novel for chapters at a time to become a treatise on whale anatomy, or a play with stage directions, or a sermon. Melville had dedicated it to Hawthorne, whose encouragement pushed him to make it stranger than the sea adventure his publisher wanted.