Picking up where Typee left off, Melville's narrator joins a decrepit whaling ship, the Julia, and her crew of ailing scoundrels; after throwing in his hat to a half-assed mutiny, he then spends a few weeks in a permissive jail on Tahiti before strolling off to observe the natives, missionaries, flo

2.5* For Melville completeists only.

Utterly lacking in the cohesiveness of his debut, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life.

Here, rather, the reader is sustained only by the writer's still-nascent voice, which if anything seems to gone a bit retrograde in its development after that first novel. The cade

Poorly paced, inconsistently interesting, and a bit unfocused. If Typee was a peep into the lives of Polynesian natives, Omoo is more a day in the life of Western folk in Pacific surrounds. The narrative meanders from one hapless attempt at finding vocation to another, seldom finding much of a struc

As Melville stated himself, Omoo is only a sequel to Typee in that it follows the events that occur to the narrator after his experience with the Typee people from his first book. Only referred to once by his nickname Typee, the otherwise unnamed narrator agrees to temporary employment on the whalin

Back in the mid-80’s at recently maligned Stuyvesant High School, Dr. Pamela Sheldon taught English and introduced me to one of the finest short stories in literature, “Bartleby, The Scrivener.” Her class was my favorite during my three year sentence at that abominable Test Factory; her assessment a

Dopo aver passato quattro mesi sull’isola di Nuku Hiva (Isole Marchesi), ospite/prigioniero di una tribù selvaggia nella valle di Taipi, raccontato nel precedente libro intitolato proprio "Taypee", il nostro protagonista riesce finalmente ad essere tratto in salvo dalla "Julia", una decrepita e malm