Fionnáin reviewed Billy Budd, Sailor by Herman Melville (Oxford World's Classics)
Layered tales from a storytelling master
4 stars
My partner and I pick a book to read to one another at night, and it generally takes a while because we don't do it every day. This was the one for the last year or so for us.
If I'm being truthful, I tend to find a lot of American authors of the so-called 'Great American Novel' tend to sit a little uncomfortably with me, particularly the white male authors of the 19th and 20th Century. For this reason, Melville, who is so often heralded as one of the first great masters of American literature, has stayed off my radar for a long time. Shame on me, I guess.
Some things I didn't know about Melville until I read this book and its corresponding notes: He was never highly regarded as a writer during his life. In fact, he was dead nearly 40 years before he reached …
My partner and I pick a book to read to one another at night, and it generally takes a while because we don't do it every day. This was the one for the last year or so for us.
If I'm being truthful, I tend to find a lot of American authors of the so-called 'Great American Novel' tend to sit a little uncomfortably with me, particularly the white male authors of the 19th and 20th Century. For this reason, Melville, who is so often heralded as one of the first great masters of American literature, has stayed off my radar for a long time. Shame on me, I guess.
Some things I didn't know about Melville until I read this book and its corresponding notes: He was never highly regarded as a writer during his life. In fact, he was dead nearly 40 years before he reached any level of critical success. This seems surprising, given the richness of his prose and the wry humour in these stories. Highlights in this collection are definitely 'Bartleby, The Scrivener', a wonderful parable about a scrivener who refuses politely to work, and the famous title work from the collection, 'Billy Budd, Sailor', Melville's last piece of writing which was never published in his lifetime. But there are others, like 'The Lightning Rod Man', that are situated stories that are both poignant and powerful in their own right. Some of the writing is a little distant for me in this collection, and if it had only been the two great stories then this would be a perfect book. The notes in this edition are also helpful to situate and explain some of the vaguer references.
I guess I am a fan now, and to paraphrase something someone on here said when I began reading this – I can see a whale in my future reading.