But when, one day, he hears there's a boat on the nearby beach, nothing will stop him. LoA editions being uniform, I have always found them to be of high quality, meaning the paper is a nice, bright white; the font is clear and pleasant; and, of course, each book is hardbound.As with other Library of America editions, this book is excellent if all you need is the primary text(s); LoA editions do not include much in the way of scholarly notes or commentary (sometimes there will be a "note on the text" but, generally, nothing more). "A travelogue and idealized South Sea island adventure story inspired by that time Melville and his crewmate, Richard Tobias "Toby" Greene, jumped ship in the Marquesas and spent a month on Nuku Hiva. Not to say that it is not a good book because it is, it's just that I only kind of liked it. My interest, in going chronologically through Melville's early works, is in watching the growth of the craftsman. It contains a lot of the dryness and descriptions of Moby Dick with none of the passion and deeper meaning. But I wanted to read something shorter than Moby Dick so that I'm not reading too many long novels at the same time. For the best experience on our site, be sure to turn on Javascript in your browser. Start by marking “Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life” as Want to Read:
I read this book quite a few years ago, after reading another book that was a fictionalised story of Herman Melville's life. An epilogue notes that Tommo was at sea for two more years after the close of this story, and that only ten days after the publication of this book, Toby and Tommo happened to meet, and thus the story of Toby's fate was added to later editions. I figured if Typee was half as good, I'd have another book to love. LibrivA terrific adventure story (based on a real-life experience) interspersed with commentary about the daily life and habits of the people of the Typee Valley in the Marquesas Islands. I liked the characters and the descriptions of the setting, and I do enjoy Melville's little diversions into the value of breadfruit or the nature of Taboo or the idiosyncracies of Polynesian speech and the Typee dialect.
The adventure begins when the first-person narrator, Tom (or Tommo as he is known by his later captors) and his crewmate Toby decide to run away from a ship they have been on from the dock at the French Polynesian island of Nukuheva (Nuku Hiva). The first two, Typee and Omoo, are both semi-biographical travelogues and adventure chronicles that detail the exotic locales of the South Pacific islands. Many of the chapters, Melville just breaks down the culture of the Typee people, and while I assumMoby Dick is my favorite book of all time, and it's not even close.
After a difficult journey in which Tom gets a leg injury, they mistakenly arrive at the Typee settlement. A language barrier prevents them from figuring this out. Melville's first book is a curious, unsatisfying, unlikely affair, which does show off Melville’s incipient facility with language and jokes and also his ability to build and maintain narrative tension; but the writing is irritatingly verbose and the whole book could be cut by a third without losing anything.
Aye, reader, as I breathe, two weeks with no other manuscript in sight; chasing after its ending under the hefty pressure of its lines, and thrown on the swells of the author’s long-winded thoughts—the pages within, the chapters all around, and not one other thing!Two weeks on this book! However, he always recognised the immense influence the voyage had had upon his career, and … Typee Summary. There are lengthy descriptions of food and cooking methods, housing, clothing, personal hygiene and grooming, rituals, sleeping habits, language, relationships.
Unlike those after him (like London, Twain, and Stevenson), Melville plays with the instability of western illusions about foreign places and people. Not exciting enough, fine, but make the *fiction* story exciting then, for Pete's sake!! If he was marooned on a cannibal island, why not just tell that as it happened? At the time it was considered quite sensational, but many twitter-brained 21st century readers seem to find it slow.