Customer Reviews

Herman Melville : Pierre, Israel Potter, The Piazza Tales, The Confidence-Man, Tales, Billy Budd (Library of America)

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Darkly humorous, cynical, horrific and melancholy, Melville's later works are the capstone to the author's deepening discontent with his America. The vision here can be frustrating: Melville conjures up the most painful, soul-searching mysteries, and then refuses to knot them up with tidy solutions. Instead, Melville deepens the moral ambiguity that seeped through the skin of the transitional Moby Dick in full-length works like Pierre and Billy Budd, Sailor. And the shorter works--among them The Piazza Tales, Benito Cereno, and Bartleby the Scrivener--are imbued with such a longing for any kind of graspable meaning, that their readers, like their characters, find themselves in a ponderous state of shock. The human condition, Melville seems to say, is one of isolation, cast adrift, searching alone for a truth that is, and always will be, inscrutable.

If you think that you can't read classic American Literature because it's all so big and intimidating (i.e., Moby Dick) think again. Some of the short stories in this collection of Melville's "other" work are incredibly well-written insights into human nature. (As is Moby Dick, but I digress).

Billy Budd's encounter with "justice," Bartleby's statement that he would "prefer not", Benito Cerino's exploration of slavery-- these tales are not to be missed. You should read this book as a starter, then move on to the BIG OLD white whale.

Nothing I can write can either do justice to this collection or convince you to read it. Those goals are simply out of my persuasive power.

All I can say is that Melville is one of those rare writers who works in the aggregate. He does not hit the nostalgia button like Twain, or compose a jaw-dropping sentence every other paragraph like Dickens. However, after reading much of Melville, a quality of reflection and thought is induced that is equally as valuable, if not superior, to some of his more immediately gratifying contemporaries.

The LA Times stated that this collection "Should find a place on every civilized person's bookshelf." They were spot on.

Combining this collection with Moby-Dick will make you more well-read, it will give you a greater depth to your literary knowledge, but more importantly, it will make you a better human being. And that is worth more than any pretty turn of phrase.

By the end of his life, Melville still kept at it, still kept turning out incredible works. Probably no other American writer has suffered from the hands of the critics (maybe Kerouac) like Melville did. "Melville Crazy" comes to mind. To think that the critics preferred Typee and the likes over Clarel and Moby-Dick! Melville was by far America's best novelist, he could be hilarious and extremely sad, quite depressing and poetic like no other novelist could be. The greatest mystery is how could such an incredible writer have been so misunderstood and ignored? It boggles the mind! The Library of America does its writers such a beautiful service and these volumes are certainly worth the extra money. All of the Melville books are great and this final one is outstanding.