Melville Fans

[Rores28]

Billy Budd and Benito Cereno

What did you think of them? How did they compare to Moby Dick? (quality-wise, thematically, prose style etc...) I'm thinkin about picking these two up in a collected volume and wanted to know if they were worth a read?

[dfloyd]

In fact, I enjoyed them more than Moby Dick, which can be quite unintereesting, especially reading through all the text on cetacians. I have a very good hardback for sale with color illustrations for $15.00 plus shipping. Except for a little sunning on the spine it is like new and comes in a slipcase. The movie of Billy Budd made in the 60s with Robert Ryan and Peter Ustinov is quite good. Terrence Stamp, in his first movie role, plays Billy Budd. If you are intrested in purchasing the two novellas bound together, send me a PM.

[Modest Proposal]

They are both excellent! Some of my favorite work by one of the greatest writers. Like Moby-Dick they are heavy and do not give their rewards cheaply. There is a lot of religious and philosophic depth to them, more then just parallels and allegories, these texts actually attempt to break new ground. Rather then reading Billy Budd as a Christ story, I find it more useful to read like one of Christ's stories, that is the parables he told.

Benito Cereno is a great exploration of good and evil in the individual when the individual is subsumed within a system already predisposed to evil. It is also an interesting study of 'race' in the traditional sense and the American nationalistic mythos in the main character's unreliability. Both of these texts can be read on so many levels.

The only caution I would make is that there are other great Melville stories such as 'Bartleby the Scrivner', 'Tartarus of Maids' and all the rest of the 'Piazza Tales'. Rather then just buying these two, you might look for one of the collections of all of the short work. Unlike many authors, Melville wrote all of his novellas and short stories in about a 10 year period with the exception of Billy Budd which was only published post-humously. You can usually find all of this work in a fairly compact (400-500) page book.

[WuWei]

Benito Cereno is a wonderful, wonderful work of art. You should definitely read it, it's up there among the very best things Melville has ever written