Customer Reviews

Bartleby the Scrivener and Other Stories [With Earbuds] (Playaway Young Adult)

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These are very high quality readings, well produced and recorded with a rich, interesting, and apt voice for Melville the social chronicler. Voice is everything in the droll story of Bartleby of course--because the enigmatic, silent clerk is really a mirror for the sensibility of the teller, his Wall Street boss. Melville is highlighted here in the best of his city stories, a mode he excelled in as much as his better known sea sagas.

The Lightning Rod Man and The Bell Tower, two minor pieces from Piazza Tales, are tossed in for balance to make an interesting set. Here you will meet even more obscure Melville masks--both somewhat exasperating--Melville the humorist & Melville the exotic. All of these stories come out of the period Melville was experimenting and playing with new modes, still gamely trying to make a living as a writer despite a dwindling audience post-white whale. Usually neglected, they are brought excitingly alive in all their patented Melvillian wierdness on this little gem of a CD.

It takes very little time to discover why Melville was a great writer. Even though his writing can seem archaic, you are drawn in by his beautifully crafted sentences. It is too bad that he never found the great sucess he hoped for before he died.