With Herman Melville is composed the triumvirate of the great adventure writers of the XNUMXth century. Because next to Robert Louis Stevenson and the inexhaustible Julio Verne, these three authors stage much of the innovative spirit, traveler, explorer, halfway between the horizon of science and the near night of superstition, beliefs and even any form of faith, ancestral in any of the manifestations of those times.
Of course, in the case of Herman Melville, writing was born as a necessity to witness his travels between seas and oceans. The concerns of an adventurer of those days, added to the imagination and creativity of those who possessed the wood of a writer, led to a multitude of novels that roamed through that same scientific and esoteric duality typical of this century.
Raised as the second of seven siblings, he undoubtedly had to learn to fend for himself while helping to support the rest of the children, since at the age of twelve he faced the tragic disappearance of his father.
So it is not surprising that when he reached 20, with an intelligence and cultural background contrasted in the most diverse performances, he decided to set out to conquer what was still to be discovered beyond any sea.
It mattered little that his first novels failed to win applause from critics and readers. The pursuit of glory would end up arriving, halfway between literature and what was most important for his traveling spirit: experiences.
Herman Melville's Top 3 Recommended Novels
Moby Dick
Who has not read this book or at least seen a film version? At the height of the best Jules Verne novels, this book opens us to a comparable adventure, in its background with the Odyssey of Ulysses or with any work that opens to the journey as a fundamental knowledge and mission of the human being.
Because Captain Ahab's search for the whale goes a long way when it comes to an adventure genre strictly speaking. But it is also that a deeper reading ends up deciphering a second intention, the one that narrates the essence of every trip, of every life behind the ideal, the mission, the intention or whatever it is that moves us.
A literary dichotomy that is also perfectly fulfilled by the world of the sea, by the exhaustive knowledge of the author who also ends up writing a marine treatise of his time. A well-rounded novel that is valued today in all its dimensions.
Benito Cereno
On some other occasion I have already talked about what it means to write a teacher as the eclipse that looms over the rest of an author's work.
Nothing that Herman Melville wrote sooner or later reaches the brilliance of Moby Dick, but considered on their own, books like Benito Cereno deserve the benefit of the doubt as they come from the same genius. We are on a desert island off the coast of Chile. The year is 1799 and Captain Delano is moored in front of the island.
The arrival of a new ship puts him on alert. When an outpost approaches Santo Domingo, as it is called, what they find there awakens their mercy. But in an adventure story, not everything is what it seems to be ... The captain of that new boat, a certain Don Benito, ends up being a strange, sinister character, capable of harboring some great secret ...
Bartleby, the clerk
Despite its brevity, this story ends up magnetizing in its strangeness. It could be called surrealist despite the fact that this current was not known in the author's time.
The point is that a centrifugal force invites you to continue reading once you have started. It all revolves around a phrase that Bartleby constantly recurs "I'd rather not."
Something strange has happened in his brain, a kind of short circuit that jams a character who, otherwise, neatly follows his duties as a clerk or copyist in the office of the narrator, a renowned Wall Street lawyer.
The moral of the story is a matter that has always been spread by word of mouth without being completely outlined. But as I say, beyond the will or intentionality of the author, the most fascinating of all is that hypnotizing power of a Bartleby who ends his days starving in jail ... About how he got there, I better not tell you, « I would prefer not to do it".
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