That's interesting about Billy Budd. I got it myself quite early, at about
17, and it has a certain static quality to its symbolic patterning that
anticipates Joyce in a way, while Bartleby is famously a fore-run of Kafka.
Best
Dave
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark Weiss" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, August 11, 2001 7:55 AM
Subject: Re: Book Review- Moby Dick
> >But what about the +rest+ of Melville (for those too short of space and
time
> >to harpoon the whale?) -- "Benidetto Cereno" [sp?], _Billy Budd_,
> >"Bartletby" ...
> >
>
>
> That's "Benito Cereno." The whole of his short story collection (most of
> them are really novellas), "The Piazza Tales," which includes it,
"Bartleby
> the Scrivener," and "The Encantadas," is great. Typee and Omoo are fun,
but
> I don't think we'd read them if they weren't by Melville. With "White
> Jacket" and "Redburn" they're fairly straightforward narratives. "Redburn"
> is to my thinking the best of the lot--there's a great portrait of
> Liverpool circa 1840. I've never managed to get more than 2/3 of the way
> thru "Mardi" or "Pierre," and considerably less of "Clarel." A few of the
> shorter poems (I'm thinking of "After the Pleasure Party") are very good.
> "The Confidence Man" and "Israel Potter" are first-rate, but not on a
level
> with Moby Dick or the stories, or with "Billy Budd," which I didn't really
> get until I'd passed 40. It's now one of my favorite books. And something
> of an act of sanctity--he wrote it in the last years of his life, after
not
> publishing any prose in 20 years, and put it away, having made no attempt
> to publish. It didn't see the light until he'd been dead 27 years. Written
> because he had to. Real, hard-won wisdom, and total, quiet mastery.
>
> What's astonishing is that no two of them, not even the short stories in
> The Piazza Tales or the 7 or 8 others he wrote, or his review of
> Hawthorne's stories, or his journal of his trip to the Holy Land, are
> alike. Melville was always inventing himself.
>
> Mark
>
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